10:14, Monday 11 Aug., 2003 Link

The future may lie in radio not in television. Two things. Firstly, radio is more in keeping with the sort of media people are consuming today. Contrast tele and film which make a claim to seamlessly replace reality, with books (for example) which can be immersive without having to do so: a book which is twice as long or the typography of which has twice the resolution isn't twice as good. People are increasingly interacting with that latter class: email, IM, www, phone... radio (music, food, gardening, architecture). Add to that the fact that radio sits easily with simultaneous browsing, email, chatting. Secondly, it is indeed key that the technology under radio is changing. Or rather, that radio is deterritorializing from its physical device roots, becoming divorced from the player, and in fact becoming divorced from listening synchronous with broadcast time also (timeshifted listening). You can see this same pattern in music: music is moving away from the storage media, and recommendations away from your immediate social network (uh, your friends) -- you can now discover artists by recommendations from strangers! Radio is becoming audio on demand, coherent with the new media and how we're living our lives. (One of the difficulties with this point of view is that's it's very easy to make bad radio - television without the pictures - as opposed to radio which sets a pace for you (faster or slower), carries you somewhere else, makes you think and imagine things you didn't think you could. Open County is one of my favourites.)