In her April 4 Online Opinion piece, Sophie Mason proposed that the proliferation of blogs has
had the weird effect that we hardly ever listen to radio any more, at least in terms of news, when before we would have clicked on both morning and evening. Perhaps it’s radio that’s going to be the most immediate sufferer in the fallout of the new media, at least in terms of news gathering. The immediacy of radio, and its nimbleness in updating stories, was once what gave it a huge advantage over print - an advantage that, of course, the new media have captured.
Mason includes this as part of her opinion "as a reader" rather than as
a creator / writer of blogs.
It is no wonder though that radio appears old-fashioned when the only
perspectives are that of reader or writer.
After all, radio is about listening.
It seems that hearing has lost its place as a medium of information, and
is now restricted solely to recreation.
Ironically, these days "having your voice heard" involves keeping
entirely shtum and pounding away on that keyboard of yours.
Listening is hardly dead though - witness for example the proliferation
of MP3 players. Nor for that matter is radio as a political medium -
John Howard has after all built his media strategy around the
effectiveness of talk-back radio for by-passing mainstream media.
The question is: why hasn't there been a similar proliferation of spoken
content, when written content has become so widespread and diverse?
1 comment:
Of course, when I wrote this, podcasts had appeared in the US, but were unheard of Australia.
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