Technolandy

Day 118 (of 2024/25) Radio Ga-Ga? Radio Nowhere  – a #tEChursday share on a fading media

Sigh – I am part of the problem: https://vancouversun.com/news/whats-happening-to-am-radio-stations-bc?tbref=hp

in this love/hate relationship with radio… it has long been my most favourite medium – whether listening to CBC when I was sick as a kid, or recording FM stations when visiting grandparents to play in the car when back at home… I channel my inner Queen and say “Radio… someone still loves you…”  and I even toyed with the idea of going into that media but wasn’t confident enough to speak to more than 30 at a time (classroom connection!) 

But… (<— which historilogically means you can ignore everything that came before this word and focus on what’s next)

I shifted my listening to satellite radio. In large part because the communities I have lived in for most of my life had limited choices on the am/fm dial… but I loved going to the big city and scrolling through the stations – even did it again when I had to rent a car to get to my grandmothers mini-celebration-of-life. But as humans are creatures of habit, I do find myself returning to my satellite offerings more frequently than the app I thought I’d use more: Radio Canada = I like it, but I don’t like ads – and they pop up to launch the app and throughout the radio broadcast… I appreciate the need for ad revenue but when I switch from station to station and still hit ads… well, then it’s time for CBC or satellite… 

The introduction of streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music (not to mention SiriusXM and YouTube) have definitely impacted the ‘need’ for radio…  which is being seen by the ‘consolidation’ that is still happening of radio stations that used to be valued in the tens of millions… but primarily because it was the lone way to get ‘back to basics’ with literacy – and listen. 

AM radio has the stronger, cheaper signal

FM radio has the clearer signal with less background interference

Radio was once used as a teaching tool… lessons would be broadcast into the rural areas – but of course it was ‘live’, no chance to pause rewind or binge…

And I used to love exploring the two bands late at night when radio signals would travel a lot further than when the sun would interfere with them. Even in the small town of Lillooet, we would start to get some signals from Vancouver (we all loved Tarzan Dan on 1040 kicks and Dan Russell’s SportsTalk on 980 – and I loved the radio classics that would go late into the night/early morning). But also signals from Seattle – if I got the antennae just right, I could hear a Mariners game and even got to hear Randy Johnsons No Hitter (I managed to hear Ken Griffeys first game while at a parking lot on our way to visit family south of Seattle)

Radios and music have always been part of my classroom and learning journey… all nighters with requestlines were great when the cd collection just didn’t have the right song… and I am enjoying teasing that maybe we ought to de-emphasize the trend of that popular fad “paper tablets” and get back to the real basics of literacy – listening and speaking…! 

The ‘theatre of the mind’ has always been attractive to me! Just interesting to see that such a powerful medium (the Howard Stern Movie Private Parts does a good job showing just how influential and powerful the organizations/businesses were) has been devalued so much… but again, I like the options of having ‘radio without commercials’ and not relying on the in & out of frequencies – so I am part of the problem. Kind of a slower disruption as with Blockbuster/Netflix – radio vs Spotify/applemusic/siriusxm… competition that was not even imagined before the turn of the millennium and not taken seriously until it was a little too late…

Sigh – well, as the line goes…. Radio: someone still loves you!