Brian Greene

From “OUR MASTER’S VOICE ADVERTISING” by JAMES RORTY
About two years ago, Dr. Lee De Forest, one of the pionieers of electronic science, and by general concession one of trie begetters of radio, encountered the lost child in his travels and was inexpressibly shocked:

“Why should any one want to buy a radio or new tubes for an old set?” declaimed the irate inventor, “when nine-tenths of what one can hear is the continual drivel of second-rate jazz, sickening crooning by degenerate sax players, interrupted by blatant sales talk, meaningless but maddening station announcements, impudent commands to buy or try, actually imposed over a background of what might alone have been good music? Get out into the sticks, away from your fine symphony orchestra pickups, and listen for
twenty-four hours to what eighty per cent of American listeners have to endure! Then you’ll learn what is wrong with the radio industry. It isn’t hard times. It is broadcasters’ greed which is worse. The radio public simply isn’t listening in.”

One wonders why Dr. De Forest should have been so surprised to encounter this Bedlam on the air. Surely he was familiar with its terrestrial equivalent. At the moment, in fact he was engaged in fighting the Radio Corporation of America in the courts.

The vulgarity and commercial irresponsibility of advertising-supported broadcasting have been greatly complained about. Yet there is a sense in which the defenders of the American system of broadcasting are right. Radio is a new instrument of social communication that and nothing more. In and of itself it contributed nothing qualitative to the culture. It was right, perhaps, or at least inevitable that it should communicate precisely the pseudoculture that we had evolved. Can any one deny that it did just that? The culture, or pseudoculture, was acquisitive, emulative, neurotic and disintegrating. Our radio culture is acquisitive, emulative, neurotic and disintegrating. The ether has become a great mirror in which the social and cultural anomalies of our “ad-man’s civilization” are grotesquely magnified. The confusion of voices out of the air merely echoes our terrestrial confusion.
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What would de Forrest make of radio today.

conor pope blogs over on the Irish Times ‘cassette death’ & I comment

long live the compact cassette (CC). while curry’s may not stock it. the glut of journalist interviews recorded via CC over the decades are still on those treasured tapes in bank vaults. think of the student (Jim Duffy) that taped Brian Lenihan Snr. that led to his fall from grace over calls to the Áras on the night a Govt. fell. Bugging scandals, radio airchecks, family sing songs, or taping Top of the Pops in a not so quite living room, all on CC somewhere. I have boxes & bag of tapes.

Alternatively I have struggled to hold archive MP3 files from hard disk to CD to website from job to job. Just because its digital does not make it all so easy. And while I do have early 1997 MP3s I can still say what is contained on a knackerd C60 AGFA from ‘83 by looking at the defacement of the cover of side B with total recall.

Its sad to see them go out of general use. But they will live on far longer than the 5.25 inch floppy disk.

Nearly 80 years ago, from a wooden hut that largely resembled a garden shed, the first ever commentary of a league football match was broadcast. 22/1/1927

20 years prior to that, radio got its first voice. Reginald Fessenden broadcast voice messages and a sound recording of ‘o holy night’ on violin to ships in the Atlantic 24/12/1906.

Now (nearly) everyone has a personal mobile phone, mp3 players, camcorders or phones that do all 3 and more. With the internet we have a channel to broadcast on, with storage for demand radio on demand, with rss and http to podcast. Now everyone can become a Peig Cunningham and their life can be recorded like Truman Burbank.

TV was better when we had 4 channels? so all the extra noise tries harder and harder to make a living off a decreasing audience share. Audience’s are bombarded with choice without the social skills or technology tools to wade thought the rubbish and find the gems.

We need new commentators, network independent, content source independent, like content analysts in differing vertical markets of content/subject/genre. Unlike politicians we elect, we need people we can trust.

While digg & youtube and others allow vote counting and hat tipping we need pillars of choice. We have content over supply with audience under supply to that content, unless there is a data recession we need a choice revolution that will see choice move away from company executives and towards content experts. Now more than ever we need those Gary Bushell types of tv critique. will you pay for it? We need new commentators.
furthermore