Radio Listening--Human Contact

["Dan Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net>]

Is it that something has happened to radio (which we KNOW is true) or that
something has happened to people--or both? Although there is human contact
on the Internet, it is normally far from immediate. (I am not into instant
messaging and hope to be able to permanently avoid it, so I post this
message and hope that somebody reads it and thinks enough of it to post a
response. Then I log in several hours--or days--later to see if my posting
was noticed and elicited a response.) Human contact on the Internet is
different from the human contact on the radio. Contact on the radio (except
for people who engage in live repartee with talk-show hosts and call
screeners) is not one-to-one, but it is immediate (or in the case of
voice-tracked shows faux-immediate).

I know that a lot of young people are said not to care about anything on the
radio besides the music (and now people are questioning whether today's
young people even care about THAT). One of the attractions of radio is--or
has been--that it provides companionship (of a sort). Is it just because I
am older that I do not find companionship in music alone without some DJ
patter? I always regarded the companionship provided by radio (with live or
simulated-live voices) as fulfilling a basic human need. What's with young
people who do not have that need? I don't understand it. Of course, for eons
before radio existed, people got along without the companionship I've
described, but since the advent of radio, which became widely available just
about when I was born (in the mid 1930s), the companionship that radio
provided was almost universal--at least in the US.

--
Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@att.net
617-558-4205, eFax 707-215-6367