I had an interesting conversation with my oldest son (who’s 10) today. I had told him about a friend of ours who was the vice president of marketing for a local radio station. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world. A guy who was involved in the marketing of a radio station. He started to equate it to the most remote areas of our country and, frankly, the picture he depicted was something akin to The Last Picture Show!
I wasn’t exactly sure what he was referring to until it occurred to me to look at it from his vantage point rather than from mine.
From his vantage point, radio was prevalent all the way through the 1950s and certainly the 1960s and, to some extent, beyond that, but not significantly.
Television, on the other hand, came into its own in the late 1950s or early 1960s and brought us to the later 1900s. Yes, television existed in the late 1940s, but it wasn’t ever on all day long until the advent of color television, which became reasonably available in the mid-1950s.
Of course, the Internet has carried us since mid-1990s. As a matter of fact, Jordan (my son) and his friend spent over three hours on the Internet tonight playing various types of games all the way from Webkins to Civilization!
As I was listening to him laughing hysterically and encouraging laughter from his 7-year-old brother about our friend’s involvement in a radio station, I realized how much my perception of radio differed from THEIR perception of radio.
I saw radio as a very legitimate device for the dissemination of information and entertainment. They saw radio as an absolute anachronism, especially in light of the Internet. Keep in mind that they don’t spend hours a day in rush hour traffic, seeking something to occupy their brains.
Once I got that, everything was easy.
As the conversation unfolded, it occurred to me what Jordan was saying – radio was really three generations removed. Since it went from radio, to television, to the Internet, and we are now in a post-Internet environment of Web deliverables, future reality is certainly not based on the past perfect of radio, television, or even basic Internet. It’s based on a level of a future thought or future speak where the message, the relevance of the message, and the medium for delivery of the message, are one in the same.
Original writing date: May 2006