One of the problems we face when talking about what’s happening to radio in the digital environment is the lack of clarity about what we mean when we say ‘radio’.
The trouble is, it has come to mean so many different things over the course of its history as a medium.
A radio is a device that sits on the kitchen bench and allows us to listen to things we call programmes. Radio is a series of professional practices that involve writing, producing, interviewing, and generally doing things that we call ‘broadcasting’. Radio is the means by which these programmes are transmitted – via ‘radio waves’. And radio is a series of institutional forms shaped by regulation and business practice.
Please explain
So when we talk about new strategies for radio, it’s important to be clear about which bit we mean. And that may sound like an exercise in semantics – but semantics are important, lest we get lost in a mire of pointless phrases like ‘podcasting is a new type of radio’ (something I hear a lot, but which is entirely devoid of meaning).
I once presented a conference paper, deliberately provocatively entitled ‘There’s No Such Thing As Internet Radio’, which made the point by talking about the things we think of as essential characteristics of radio: it’s time-bound, linear, secondary, geographically defined, etc. — and comparing those things to what we think of as the essential characteristics of the internet. That is, the opposite of all of those things.
The point is that when developing strategies for radio (whatever, in fact, that may be) it pays to be entirely deliberate about what we mean, what we are trying to achieve – and which bit of radio we happen to be talking about.
Because without that very simple and obvious bit of clarity, it’s very easy to descend into vague, utopian (or dystopian) nonsense that is little better than guesswork and technobabble.