Atlantic Monthly
Technology
December 2007
Move
over, iPod: Internet radio captures the enduring
magic of the medium and makes the local global.
by Bill McKibben
The iPod shows you mainly what’s already going on in your head—it’s cool, but only as cool as solipsism can ever be. I’ve got a way cooler device: a squat little box that sits on your kitchen counter or your bedside table and connects you to pretty much the entire Earth. And in so doing makes you think anew about the global and the local and what community amounts to—makes you think about connection, which is, after all, the main topic of our age. It’s a kind of home epistemology center that also happens to rock.
Or croon, or wail, or chat, or do anything else a radio can do. Because that’s all I’m talking about: a table radio, though one that, assuming you have a broadband connection and wireless network in your house, lets you tune in to almost any station anywhere that’s streaming its signal on the Net. Your computer will let you do this too (go to www.reciva.com for a portal that will let you listen in), but there’s something about having a little box there in the kitchen—the whole thing is more elegant (think presets), and it connects you with the earliest moments of electronic entertainment. Because radio is, of course, the great survivor medium, a century old and still occupying more hours in the average American’s week than network television—and just about every other type of entertainment, too.
At the moment, radio’s most talked-about form is satellite—XM and Sirius, eager to merge their
hundred-channel lists of music and talk into something
profitable. But given what’s out there for free, it’s hard to imagine why
anyone would bother to pay for a satellite subscription (except for the fairly
crucial fact that you can get satellite radio in your car, while easy
Web-streaming in transit is still some years off). Like reggae? There’s a
reggae channel on XM. But if you own an Internet radio—mine is an Acoustic
Energy model, produced by an English company and available from many
electronics retailers for about $300—you can listen to seven different stations
from
Indeed, if, like me, you’re a pathetic Anglophone, then much of the Internet
listening experience is about the rise and fall of the
Best of all is BBC Radio 4. It’s the talk channel, but there’s not much American-style call-in-we’re-all-experts-here chatter. Instead, it’s the aural equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with documentaries on “The Greenspan Years,” or “Boris Yeltsin: A Flawed Giant,” or “Peak Nestwatch,” a nature group that campaigns against, among other things, “serial egg collectors” who shoot birds of prey. You might hear The Food Programme chronicling the vegetarian roots of Jainism, or an actor reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, or another actor performing the winning story in the National Short Story contest. There’s also The Archers, believed to be the longest-running radio soap in the world, each episode of which lasts a quite reasonable 15 minutes.
Until it went off the air in May, my favorite BBC Radio 4 show was A World in Your Ear, which showcased radio from around the planet, each week on a theme. One week, for instance, it was Zimbabwe’s travails: I listened to a clip from the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, but also ones from the community radio station in Bulawayo (a station that’s been denied a license by the government, so it exists only on cassettes and CDs passed hand to hand), and from the Voice of America broadcasts into Zimbabwe (jammed by the state), and from the talk shows on Cape Town radio that have turned into a forum on Robert Mugabe’s tyranny.
A World in Your Ear made clear that the real glory of Internet radio
lies not in the polished programs of the BBC, delightful though they
are—instead, it lies in the ability to eavesdrop on local discussions, to hear
the world in its various moods and timbres. For most of the 20th century,
listeners tried to do this with shortwave radio, but it was difficult, and not
just because of the hissing static. Shortwave stations have generally been
government operations, designed to show a certain face to the world—they have
been remarkably alike in their somber (and untrustworthy) approach. But radio,
at its best, is the most gloriously local of all media, hemmed in by the
nearest range of hills, signals fading 10 miles out of town. We’ve forgotten
much of this in the
Which is why it’s so nice to be able to easily listen to what
real American radio remains. My tabletop pulls in nearly every
public-radio station in America, meaning that the great talk shows on dozens of
stations—KUOW (Seattle), KPCC (Los Angeles), KQED (San Francisco), WBUR and WGBH (Boston), WNYC (guess)—are always in range. You can listen to famous
music programs, like Morning Becomes Eclectic from KCRW (
Compared with all this splendor, satellite radio is
exposed for what it really is: a glorified airline entertainment
system—hundreds of channels signifying next to nothing. Signifying
next to nothing because satellite comes from nowhere. Just like
the Clear Channel stations, it surrenders the thing that makes radio so
magical: connection to a community. As a rough rule of thumb, the smaller the
community at which a signal is aimed, the more interesting the radio—it scales
down better than it scales up. Unlike television, which looks amateurish until
you’ve spent large sums of money and so must always aim for a large audience to
cover its costs, radio allows anyone with talent and access to a transmitter to
create compelling programs for practically nothing. And it gets more
compelling—more real—the smaller it gets. So ZIZ, the voice of
Radio is mental travel. Listening to Sirius, even the world-music shows, is like traveling to Club Med. You aren’t going to be disappointed or upset—but you aren’t going to be excited or entertained, either. It’s just like home, except someplace else. Tuning around the local-radio dial is more like staying in an endless string of bed-and-breakfasts, the kind with talkative hosts. Sometimes it’s boring, but boring in an interesting way.
One of my favorite stations, for instance, is WOJB, on an Ojibwa reservation in northern
Internet radio has its challenges, of course. Some are technical (stations that refuse to boot up; college stations, predictably, have the best Web connections), and some are political (the recording industry, in its ongoing effort to alienate every possible customer, keeps trying to get Internet stations to pay more than terrestrial radio for the right to broadcast songs, perennially threatening to take them off the air).
And I don’t listen to it all the time. Since I live in a particular place
myself, I do listen to the few stations—public, community, college, and even
one commercial—that still cover my locale and keep me in touch with my
neighbors, my sports, my politics, my weather. But sometimes the summer sun
wears me down, and I switch on the CBC Yellowknife service, just to listen to the cool
temperatures of the