Paul, Jennifer, and I did a fun podcast at my house the other day in which we discussed what I have coined the post-“Radio is Dead” era. Basically the wags, wonks, and wise guys of the Internet have given up declaring that radio is deceased, but nobody quite knows what to think about it now. In the immortal words of the famously and unexpectedly defeated Thomas Dewey in the presidential election of 1948, “If I am alive, what am I doing here? And if I’m dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”
So here goes: my random thoughts on our post-postmortum radio landscape.
Thought Number One: Radio can no longer be defined by any single transmission medium.
Once upon a time when we thought about radio we associated it with AM/FM. But in retrospect, that 20th-century way of doing and understanding radio may have been anomalous. As I argued in my book Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium, through the centuries we have read print in many different forms: books, newspaper articles, scrolls, teletype, LED freeway signs, just to cite a few examples. Why did we think that we would always listen to broadcast sound via AM/FM and no other format? In our time, radio is no longer defined by the technology that transmits it. Which takes us into . . .
Thought Number Two: Radio is better understood as an idea instead of a technology.
This was probably always true, but it feels like an especially useful concept now. In the absence of a technological unifier for radio’s identity, some fundamental understanding of the medium seems more urgent. Here’s my definition. Radio is any form of audio transmission that seeks an audience. It is the one-to-many aspect of radio that makes it fundamentally different from telephony. But what is an “audience,” you ask? Well . . .
Thought Number Three: The best radio audiences are conscious of themselves
Of course it is nice to have lots of listeners out there in Internet-land. But the most powerful and empowering audiences are self-aware. They know that they exist, that they are collectively groking the information and culture they receive from their radio source. This self-awareness gives any radio program in question much more power and authority than it might enjoy based solely on the quality of its content. The program and its audience become something moving together in real-time through time and history. Except in the post-“Radio Is Dead” world, real-time has changed.
Thought Number Four: Real-Time is now On-Demand Time
As radio moves further away from an AM/FM centered vision of broadcasting, it has become more focused on on-demand rather than real-time delivery. Once upon a time (to be redundant), I lived in a world in which if you did not turn on your radio or television set at an immediate, specific moment, you missed a program, possibly forever. Now you don’t, because it is saved in the networks’ box, or your box, or both. But increasingly we hasten to tune into on-demand content, even if we can get it later. This is especially true with podcasts. So in the post-“Radio-is-Dead” era any moment of real-time is in fact an array of the hours and days it takes for most of the audience to eat up the audio package. Real-time is still real, but it’s stretched out over, well, time; specifically: a duration of on-demand time.
Thought Number Five: Television finds itself in the we’re-all-in-it together landscape with which radio has always worked.
Some of the experts disagree with me on this, but I think that radio has always been far more enmeshed with other media technologies than television. Most cars have radios, but not TV sets (thank goodness). HiFi stereos quickly incorporated FM into their systems, but television not so much. Indeed, the slow development of FM in the USA can be attributed in part to RCA’s desire to first pair up the technology to TV. In the 1980s, most boomboxes sported radio receivers; only a fraction offered video. And of course we all remember clock radios. We may even still have one around.
Today, however, it’s a new game. “Television” has been transformed into movies, TV shows, and YouTubes everywhere: on your mobile, on your tablet, on your laptop, or in the back seat of your taxi. TV has joined radio as a multi-platform technology so ubiquitous that it too has lost some of its centrality. Even the hallowed HDTV shares its screen with the gaming console. TV is now just another app, which radio has been used to being since long before the arrival of Netscape in the mid-1990s. Because TV has moved down a notch in the media techno-ecological landscape, radio no longer resembles its country cousin.
So congratulations on your post-Death status, radio. Who knows where all this is going? I certainly don’t. In the meantime, nothing reminds me of radio’s present transitional status more than a funny little poem by Ogden Nash:
At midnight in the museum hall,
The fossils gathered for a ball,
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
Rolling, rattling carefree circus,
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas,
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses,
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil,
‘Cheer up sad world,’ he said and winked,
‘It’s kind of fun to be extinct’.
