Social Media Killed the Radio Star.
I have become fascinated with radios and newspapers over the past few days.
The impetus that spurned the fascination was my own illogical action: Two nights ago, I was driving home, realized that I was driving on empty, and was about to pull into a nearby gas station when Lupe Fiasco - Superstar came on the radio. Instead of turning into the gas station, I chose to continue driving until the song was over, and find a different gas station. The illogicality of the choice is that I have the song on my computer, and I can listen to it whenever I want.
Additionally, I recently unearthed a CD a close friend gave me for my birthday last year, and have been listening to a certain song on it on repeat while driving. It helps me concentrate. Yet, when the song came on the car radio, I turned it up louder and enjoyed it just a little bit more. I had just heard the song two minutes before! Yet, the emotional reaction to hearing the song on the radio was tremendously different than being able to choose control it on a CD.
Perhaps, I felt a twinge of vindication that someone else (whether a Disc Jockey or a request line) had agreed with my taste in music, and that transformed my normal solitary listening experience to a communal one.
In a similar vein, I like reading random things in Wikipedia and books. Sometimes they may be relevant to current events and trends, at other times, I just find them interesting.
Last week, while researching somethings for a post, I read the Wikipedia entry on "War", and encountered a theory that I had heard about before: the concept of the "Youth Bulge". A few days later, I saw on someone's feed that there was an op-ed or analysis in a leading US newspaper that linked that concept to the Palestinian people, specifically in Gaza. Again, there was a validation of my internal thought processes.
But this caused me to remember growing up with the New York Times, and seeing how whole sections are written about non-time sensitive topics, rather simply because someone found them interesting. The job of the writer/columnist/editor is to bring to light knowledge that may have been known in smaller groups of people to the masses.
This comes at the heels of an interesting interaction that I had with a random individual while sitting at the organic cafe that I enjoy so much. From a previous meeting, he remembered that I do something with the interwebs and blogs, and he asked me how he could anonymously publish an expose about inherent Anti-Semitism in a piece by a well-known South African artist. The exhibit is roughly 12 years old. I asked him why anyone should care. But we all know that articles like this are printed all the time. It temporarily raises hype about something that no one necessarily cared about for a long time. Because someone cares about it now.
If I would use a social media term to define what the radio and newspapers are, the word would have to be "feed".
Similar to the low cost of entry of a twitter follow, one can easily scan both radio stations and newspapers for interesting or relevant knowledge. (I am choosing not to talk about traditional channel surfing on Television in the same way, because it is set up in specific blocks, whether 1/2 hour or hour. This is problematic, because unless you invest a sizable amount of time, you can't get a complete piece of information.)
A feed is more than simply information, it provides a communal comfort around it, that this is what other people are talking about, listening to, or reading. The information becomes more that just knowledge, it becomes a tool for intelligently interacting with other people in your society.
iTunes party shuffle cannot do the same thing as the radio or as blip.fm. A library can never do what a newspaper or Mahalo.com does. It may all be the same information. But context is just as important as content, if not more. And people thrive on the human context.
As with all comparisons, I believe that after ascertaining a viable model in a different sphere, the next step is seeing how to better utilize the models of the radio and the newspaper in social media.
What do you think?
