Radio Waves

Posted on 08/16/2005

Science Library Pad links to an interesting story from the Globe and Mail on how the Internet has surpassed radio among wired Canadians. I have related my story on getting my first radio in the past, but I have to confess that I felt a twinge of sadness to see radios declining in popularity. Of course, radio programming is probably as strong now as it ever was, and the Internet has made for some fascinating hybrids of radio broadcasting and delivery, so the medium is still quite vibrant. My regret springs more from the decline of the device itself.

I remember searching the airwaves late at night and being amazed that on certain evenings, with the aerial pointed in the right direction, and assuming there were no storms, I could hear voices from as far away as New York coming live into my home in Nova Scotia. My radio adventures were mostly in the mid 1970s, in fact, I am almost certain that the first glimpse I had of the leading edge in broadcasting was a telephone poll on WABC in New York pitting Kiss' "Rock and Roll All Nite" against a song by the Bay City Rollers (and I think Kiss won, though I could have dozed off before the results announced). I could also synchronize the radio with my Radio Shack Goofy Light Kit and achieve what seemed to be a pretty nifty multimedia experience. Well, as long as no one walked too near and caused one of the wires to come loose.

I wonder if my own children will look back on the Internet and the progression of computing devices they have grown up around, and remember the transition points as clearly. I suspect they will see communications technologies as a much more seamless progression, and that no one long-standing device will be seen as a conduit to the outside world. I have written about my first interaction with a library before but, in some ways, the radio represented the other side of the same pathway. The library was a place I could go to find worlds I wanted to explore, and the radio was an essential link to the world I lived in. We had a television when I acquired my radio, but this was before cable was an option where I lived, and the radio was a vastly more exciting medium late at night anyway.

I have always been fascinated by the power of media that doesn't slice and dice every part of the experience for the participant. The written word, of course, can achieve an interaction like no other medium in this regard, but I think radio broadcasting is compelling for many of the same reasons. It reaches out to a deeply personal space in a way that doesn't overwhelm the receiver. In some ways, I see blogs as similar to radio broadcasting, and podcasts are even more firmly placed in a radio-based tradition. In each case, there is a conduit for external voices to appear, but not with an intensity and volume that shuts out everything else.

My first radio still sits in Nova Scotia. It took a bunch of D cells to power it and somewhere along the way I left a set in too long. The battery acid leaked out and messed up the circuits, so it is no longer operational, but I could never bring myself to throw it away. It was still in active service into the start of the 1980s because I know I listened to "Just Like Starting Over" right before going to sleep the night that John Lennon died. But I don't think I took it with me to university and it would be many years before I rediscovered my love of radio transmissions in making my current commute to work.

I never had the voice to be a broadcaster, even for university radio, and my family and children continue to assure me that my taste in music is simply too weird to ever achieve an audience anywhere but in some alternative universe where Patsy Cline and Howlin' Wolf are always at the top of the charts. Yet when I look at something like bloglines, I think of a familiar round dial for tuning in voices I want to hear.

Walt Crawford has recently done an amazing job of identifying how many voices are broadcasting, and I was honoured that I was included in the list. I fear I am still too wordy for this medium (LibraryCog was listed as having an average posting length of 2362 words, which sounds right to me) I also suspect that my chosen broadcasting system, in this case squishdot, my blog platform, is not at the top of most lists of blogging options (in fact, I think it is the way that squishdot displays dates that leads to the starting date of LibraryCog to be listed as January 2005, when it has been around since the Fall of 2003).

I am still working away at replacing squishdot but I don't think I will ever be able to match the output of my blogging brethren. Maybe this blog is more like the weekly or monthly specials than the nightly programming. It was these kind of specials that introduced me to Patsy and the Wolf, so I am not too put out to be on a longer term playlist. The important thing is that through the efforts of a diverse group of people putting together their own broadcasts, there's a lot out there, even if there is some occasional static. I haven't seen anyone resurrect that Kiss/Bay City Rollers poll though, maybe some traditions really do belong in the past.