I’m thinking about working on this design… honest
I can still clearly remember one night in High School in a car with some friends after a party. We were parked somewhere, drinking beers and doing things that high school students do at night when someone turned the radio on.
Through the AM static we could hear from the announcer’s voice that while sitting in a parking lot on Long Island we were listening to a local talk show from Detroit.
Amazing.
I still love shortwave. I have three world band radios in addition to the one I bought for Jeremy. I have a ham license even though I’ve never used it (gotta get a rig one of these days…).
There was a time in this country when to go from place to place meant the radio and TV shows were different. There was local color and character. You could turn on the radio in a new town and hear the local gossip, what the Mayor said and where the best place in town was for a cup of coffee or a good price on a pair of pants.
That’s all gone now, thank you very much deregulation. One radio station pretty much sounds like every other radio station and you have to go outside the bands - to shortwave, the pirate bands, or to podcasting and internet radio - just to hear something different. Something that makes you feel like there’s a human being on the other side.
That’s why I love Dawn and Drew, and Eric (build your own damn Hollywood!) and Rob and the rest of the crazy MFs who are doing it themselves.
I hope someday my kids can have the joy of hearing that static clear long enough for some far away human voice to break through. But I can’t even begin to imagine what sort of technology they’ll be using.
Garrison Keillor, another radio geek, has some profound thoughts on the state of radio today.
link via Doc Searls
“I’ve never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each New Year’s Eve, those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.”
I hear you man. We’ve talked about this before. Radio isn’t radio anymore. It’s merely a product. No personalities, no wacky sponsors, no locality.
Personally, I thought the best place to pick up radio stations was in your bed late on a warm spring night with the windows open. It seemed more like spying if you could pick up a late-night Chicago show.