A couple of weeks ago the wonderful Desert Donkey posted a comment tipping us to a nice article at Atlantic.com on the future of radio.
The iPod shows you mainly what’s already going on in your head—it’s cool, but only as cool as solipsism can ever be. I’ve got a way cooler device: a squat little box that sits on your kitchen counter or your bedside table and connects you to pretty much the entire Earth. And in so doing makes you think anew about the global and the local and what community amounts to—makes you think about connection, which is, after all, the main topic of our age. It’s a kind of home epistemology center that also happens to rock.
There’s some nice analysis, and lots of pointers to cool on-line radio stations (including plenty of Beeb product). One thing I think it misses out is the interaction between live radio and podcasting, or at least the possibility of timeshifting radio as a matter of course. The piece also assumes that listeners want to hear new things and have their horizons expanded, and I think the jury’s still out on that one.
Thanks to DD for the tip; sorry for being a bit slow about promoting it!
