Wired Magazine enthuses: Forget Radio, Tune In to Net
The magazine that has McLuhan as its Patron Saint should bloody well require its columnists to read his work. Announcing that “web music broadcasting is the best thing to happen to radio” is like saying that the automobile is the best thing to happen to the horse, or that the gramophone is the best thing to happen to sheet music. It bears a faint resemblance to the medium. At best, it has aspects of the medium as its content.
Katie Dean gushes that “…with Internet radio, listeners can tap libraries of millions of songs that would never be broadcast on the airwaves.” – which, the astute observer will note, is like saying “with televisual theatre, viewers can watch more than one play simultaneously, switching effortlessly between stages as the action varies from theatre to theatre – or even seeing performances that would never make it to the boards.”
It’s just nonsense – and evidence of the uncritical technological determinism that passes for new media journalism. To work for Wired Magazine and call something ‘Internet Radio’ would be like talking about the latest shows on the ‘wireless telegraph’ in Median Strip.
Let’s not muck around: ‘Internet Radio’ is a contradiction in terms. The phrase signals that a change is underway, but that it’s not properly understood. Radio and the internet have almost entirely opposite characteristics…
Radio is, after all, linear, time-bound, one-to-many, geographically-constrained and an entirely sensible thing to have in your car.
Radio and the internet can co-exist. Both can make use of the other. They have some features in common (though not immediately obvious ones. I’d argue that both are acoustic media, one hot, the other cool – but that’s a long post for another time).
To put it simply, what Wired Magazine is enthusing about is a form of online music distribution. And it may well be very good and very popular.
It’s just not radio.
