Hello there. I’m James Cridland, and I’ve been working in radio and new media for the last fifteen years or so. This website kindly links to my blog, and you’ll see the odd blog posting too from me here.

Last week, the great and good from the radio industry met in Westminster, London, for a conference run by the Radio Academy, which I was responsible for chairing.

The conference, Radio at the Edge, has been running for some time now, but it’s difficult to explain quite what it discusses. Its tagline, “What’s next, now”, goes a little way towards suggesting that it’s to do with new technology that makes radio programming better. Yes, things like new forms of broadcasting radio, but mainly what happens, to quote my own blog’s byline, “where radio and new platforms collide”.

I wrote up the event, while sitting at the back, in a long and somewhat badly thrown-together live blog. But if you don’t have the patience to read it (I certainly don’t), here’s what we learnt:

• Absolute Radio used their social media network to perform the UK’s largest radio rebrand in a really interesting and open way; giving unprecedented control to the listener.
• DAB Digital Radio, while suffering from some commercial pressures, is still alive and well within the UK, and can coexist well with internet broadcasting
• The BBC World Service uses the internet in a clever tactical way – from online questionnaires, to innovative broadcasting and mobile use.
• Blogs, Twitter, etc, can strengthen radio presenters’ connections with their audience, to a degree that almost means that if they change radio station, their audience will mostly follow them
• Music personalisation services like last.fm might not be the killer to radio that some people think
• Adding visuals to radio can make for a really interesting proposition, and Global Radio launched an iPhone app during the event
• Leo Laporte spoke about podcasting and radio in the US – seeing podcasting as being a useful addition to radio, but not a total replacement. And he also spoke about how he’s earning revenue from the podcasts he does.
• Andrew Collins and Richard Herring performed a live podcast in front of us, and gave us some interesting statistics about what their audience thought about their programme.

Radio conferences are sometimes a hit and miss affair. But I hope that this year, it was rather more ‘hit’ than ‘miss’. What are your thoughts on radio conferences? What are the good ones you’ve been to? Do let me know in the comments.

First, I’m currently reading the 1931 autobiography of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Victorian physicist who first publicly demonstrated radio transmission in an Oxford lecture theatre in 1894. Leaving aside the complex and disputed issue of who ‘invented’ radio, where, and when, we certainly know that Lodge has a strong claim to be counted among the founding figures of the medium. With his mind focused on pure science, he let the technology slip into the hands of other, more commercially-minded men, chief among them Marconi. But what intrigues me is the way in which, given both his later desire to communicate science to a wider public through radio talks and his equally well-known dabbling with psychic phenomena – most famously, perhaps, his belief that he could use wireless to ‘contact’ his son, Raymond, following his death at the Somme in 1916 – he somehow envisaged the communicative potential of the medium far more honestly and intuitively than Marconi ever did. I think his story might be a revealing way into the fundamental question of why radio took off as a social phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War. To push the matter further still, I’d like to know – and I’m looking for ways to find out – exactly what it felt like for ordinary people to listen to radio in the earliest years, how it changed the way they thought about the world. They’re questions we need to keep asking, I think – childish, ’so what?’ questions, maybe, but ones that surely need to be asked at all stages of technological development.

My second interest in radio’s relationship between past and future is more taxing, perhaps. It’s to historicize the ‘digital revolution’. Or, to put it another way, it’s to ask what the broader historical significance might be of recent and current shifts in listening habits, when, in the future, we look back to the present. Actually, my default position on such matters, having been educated as a Medievalist in thrall to the Long Duree approach, is to quote Chou En Lai’s reply when asked a few years back for his reading of the effect of the French Revolution of 1789: “too early to tell”, he is said to have replied. Yet, the journalist in me wants to have a go at that first draft of history. Besides, my horizon isn’t endless: I’m not planning to capture every dimension of social change. How could I? My focus, in fact, is very much just on consciousness. I’m interested in knowing where the digital revolution might be taking our brains. And there are some interesting developments in cognate disciplines that we need to keep an eye on, I reckon. True, talk of media ‘effects’ is supposed to have had its day. But, having rubbished the first, and most primitive versions of this school of analysis, it might be time to re-examine some of its more persuasive aspects. The 1990s, so the neuroscientists say, was the ‘decade of the brain’. We now know quite a bit more than we did in the 1930s, or even in the 1980s, about the relationship between the senses and our thought-processes. The brain, it would seem, is highly plastic: what we see and hear re-wires it more than we imagined. The field for research is opening up in exciting ways. And, as I try to navigate my way through it, I’d like to think aloud here, with you – and to know whether you think I’m discovering new frontiers or I’m simply lost in a New World wilderness of my own foolish making.

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.