Re: Radio Listening--Human Contact

["Sean Smyth" <ssmyth@suscom.net>]

Dan Strassberg writes:
> 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.

You bring up some interesting issues. Anyone 14-and-under has been brought
up in an age where, since their earliest memories, instant messaging has
been a popular communication tool. Anyone 25-and-under (my bracket) has
adapted to this as well, and also to some degree relies on IM communication.
In a society with two-income families and smaller families in general, there
are many times that kids don't communicate with anyone else in the real
world for three or four hours a day between the time school lets out and the
parents come home from work (especially if it's only a one- or two-child
household). This is even more pronounced in college dorms, where many kids
just lock themselves up in dorm rooms after classes and surf the web and/or
log into chat rooms non-stop. I rarely see kids playing outside in my
neighborhood (I live on the edge of a subdivision that has a bunch of
families with younger children) and it's my belief that kids aren't getting
any sort of socialization skills nowadays.

Bringing this back to radio...this generation is much more comfortable with
silence and lack-of-human contact and doesn't need to hear a DJ to
facilitate that human contact. In fact, most kids (and I even feel this way
to an extent sometimes) feel that some of these attention-getting, loudmouth
DJs (Stern wanna-bes, particularly, who aren't as good and/or original as
Stern) are *very* annoying.