Do you ever get the feeling that your life is turning into a scene from Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers? I swear, everyone around me is being taken over by iPods. I started noticing it three weeks ago when I was driving around the Glasgow suburbs. Lost and without a map, I pulled over to ask a stranger for directions.

"Excuse me? Hello?" His lack of response I found rude but not atypical of suburbanites. I stepped out of the car and the guy was immediately thrown into total panic, striking some kind of kung-fu pose, pulling out his iPod earplugs and shouting: "F*** off! Leave me alone!" as if he thought I was trying to mug him. As I tried to explain, he practically ran away. How very strange, I thought.

It's worth noting the comparison between the bodies snatched in the sci-fi classic and iPod users. Like the snatched, podders are less aware of their own movements and find it hard to negotiate space between themselves and other people. In supermarkets they reach out suddenly, hit you with their elbows, only to freak out when suddenly they sense you beside them. In a toilet last week, a man at the urinal with iPod on pee-ed on his own foot after realising, in shock, that I had walked in and caught him singing to himself. It's as if the podders suddenly find themselves repulsed to be in the world of normal humans, which is even more evidence that they are not like us.

Then, on a day in Kelvingrove Park when the wind whistled gently through the trees, the river gurgled and the birds sang a veritable symphony, I witnessed four joggers in a row passing me by with speaker-plugs in and iPods strapped to their arms. Now I can understand why people might want to drown out the drone of traffic and the inane chatter of modern living – but to escape from the sounds of nature? And with what? Dance music, or maybe even a relaxation track with the sound of a stream on it.

It was then that a horrific thought came to me – what if all these podders were listening to the same thing – a secret message that I was not privy to – something alien and terrifying, like a code telling them to eliminate the remaining humans. Did not the snatched bodies in the sci-fi original get reborn from Pods? On some level this is no joke. There is a common message that all iPods communicate. It is this: leave me alone, with your disgusting intrusions into my private space; I chose not to be in the real world, but in the world of 'I'.

This is all the more sinister as this iWorld is encroaching further and further into public space. How will it be possible in the future for people to strike up conversations with strangers, or chat them up, or even fall in love at first sight, if the request to unplug from iSpace is seen as threatening?

Imagine entire neighbourhoods populated by solitary podders, avoiding everyone around them. Can one conceive of an image more antithetical to that of a political demonstration than a thousand iPodders, assembled in one space?

They come not from outer but from inner space. Can't you see? They're taking over! You could be next!