On the radio

It is the very intimacy of radio that tricks you into believing that these academics speak to you and you alone; it also helps that you can't see them, so that you might in fact be closeted under some vast and capacious duvet with weighty somethings being whispered in your ear. - Will Self
At Christmas, my second son - the broadcast journalist and producer John E. Parman - told Bill McClung (of Berkeley's University Press Books) and me that radio is a much better medium than the Internet, in his opinion: faster to build an audience and easier to monetize. A few days before, he noted to me that when you have the radio on, it stays in the background, but if you hear something that interests you, you focus in. I think this is the way most listeners hear it, but I find I can't tune it out. Still, I agree with John. As a medium that predates TV and should have fallen away long since, it persists. (Quoted from "Diary," London Review of Books, 25 February 2010, page 34.)

Comments

  1. I wish I'd known about that article. Can you send it to me?
    JEP

    ReplyDelete

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