Radio Is Dead, Long Live Radio

Recently, I found myself wondering about radio. Radio, which had its first licensed broadcast in 1920 (Pluskota, 2015), has survived decades of new technology that should have destroyed it: television, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, and MP3 players, just to name a few. Yet radio managed to survive it all, by doing what any struggling industry must do to survive: they adapted. During the 1950s, with the rise of television, radio broadcasters decided to change tactics: instead of radio drama, they began to focus on appealing to the younger generation through music, specifically rock and roll (Alexander, 1985). This change ended up being crucial: it made radio what it is today, allowing it to survive as a source of music and news on the go. Radio survived through adaptation.

Radio’s struggle isn’t over. It’s facing a new threat, one that is threatening numerous industries today: the Internet. With the Internet has come smartphones, smartphones that allow you to stream music or podcasts and get breaking news more quickly from more sources. According to Pluskota (2015), radio must do what many newspaper companies did in the recent past: completely revamp what radio is, and instead become a “media listening experience.”

This struggle is one that is painfully familiar to anyone in the library field. Libraries, like radio and newspapers, are threatened by the Internet. And like newspapers, libraries must be willing to completely reconsider what it means to be a library. Libraries have the extra difficulty of needing to be able to serve their specific communities — the needs of a community in downtown Chicago are not going to be the same as the needs of a small community in rural Illinois. Radio also has the added benefit of having survived a large perspective shift before, whereas American public libraries have more or less been the same since they began. Still, survival is not impossible. Libraries are already working to redefine themselves to their communities by promoting themselves as community spaces — spaces to meet up, host events, or use technologies that most people would not have access to otherwise (3D printers, for example). The fight is long from over, but if done well, libraries can survive, just as radio and newspapers have before them.

References:

Alexander, R. (1985). Recalling how radio survived the arrival of TV. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/09/arts/recalling-how-radio-survived-the-arrival-of-tv.html?pagewanted=all

Pluskota, J.P. (2015). The perfect technology: Radio and mobility. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 22(2), 325–336. doi: 10.1080/19376529.2015.1083378.