radio days

Doc said of my idea below I think it wouldn't be radio, exactly. Also that it would preclude the old-fashioned radio art of talking over parts of a tune.

Of course it wouldn't be radio. Internet Radio isn't radio. Let me tell you about what radio means to me.

I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s listening to radio - Listen With Mother on Radio 4 every day - the nice lady would say 'Are you sitting comfortably?' in her perfect RP tones, 'Yes!' I'd reply, leaning forwards toward the set - a big old yellow bakelite and burled wood Valve set my parents had brought back from Sweden, with lots of shortwave bands and European stations marked on it in Swedish, and a special green-glowing valve set into the front to indicate signal strength - 'Good, then I'll begin.'

Radio 4 was on long wave only then, and was used to send shipping forecasts to ships at sea just before every hour. These were hypnotic, like dada poetry, 'Tyne, Dogger, German Bight, seven. Rising more slowly. Good. Channel Light Vessel Automatic, five rising six. Fair. Pip Pip Pip Pip Peeeep. This is BBC Radio 4 It is 1pm Greenwich Mean Time. Here is the news...'

At 12.27 every day, just after the news, and before 'The World at One' did its stentorian current affairs roundup, a panel game would be aired - 'Just a Minute', 'Brain of Britain', 'Round the Horne', later 'The News Quiz ', but always to be hoped for 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue', whose sublime improvised silliness satirized the rest of them very well.

Later, when I was 11 or so, I remember lying in bed at 11.30pm with a small transistor set and an earpiece, listening to the first broadcast of 'The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy'. Shortly afterwards I became hooked on the Top 40 chart show, broadcast on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons for two hours. This was the one and only national chart that mattered, and I wrote down each weeks list in a little notebook, and sat poised at my radio/cassette to record the songs I liked onto tape. Talking over parts of the tune was a curse, and not appreciated at all.

What I did appreciate was Kenny Everret's show on Capital, the London Independent station, which must have taken him most of the week to mix and prepare, combining current and classic music with bizzare sound effects, running gags and more inspired silliness.

These days, I would never think to turn on the radio in the house - it something I listen to while driving, generally KQED, and there are programs there I enjoy, such as 'This American Life', but they aren't part of the cultural fabric of the era for me like the state monopoly radio stations of my youth.

Web radio is no more radio than blogging is journalism - there are some commonalities in the form and the media (sound, words) involved, but the dynamic is going to be different.

Part of what enabled the web to explode was the ability to easily and universally cite a particular page and discuss it, freely and without permission, and with no endorsement implied. If you misrepresent or unfairly attack someone you link to, your readers can follow the link and see for themselves whom they find more persuasive. That NPR is attempting to disallow this shows a shocking misunderstanding of the power of this new freedom.

This is what we need for other media - a canonical, universal way to refer to a particular piece of music or other recording, that we can excerpt and link to as part of our own creation. Sending compressed copies of tunes synchronously once to a few listeners is imposing the limitations of radio onto a new medium that has the potential to be far more flexible and expressive - it is like early cinema, where a single fixed camera would film a whole play, with the proscenium arch neatly framed in the shot.