Battlestar Radioactiva

I rather like living without a television. Of course, I could watch TV on my laptop, but I choose not to. The only thing I really miss is Law and Order SVU. The rest I get from the kitchen radio while I’m cooking. News, music, entertainment. And I enjoy having information coming at me through only one sense, leaving the rest of me available to whatever else I am doing. It’s the original multi-tasking I guess, but it doesn’t feel strenuous. It feels relaxed. I breathe easier. Television is so high-energy, with so many ads, and so many channels to choose from. And I find radio more engaging, because it leaves the visual up to the imagination.

I was at a lunch earlier this week, and there was a newspaper journalist there, who was talking about how no one in the newspaper industry is quite sure where the medium is going to go, since many people don’t rely on printed newspapers anymore for their everyday information. This was standard discussion in journalism school as well. But listening to the radio reminds me that that, at least, is not a dying art form. It’s fast, it’s accessible, and for the most part, it’s free. People like those kinds of things. So radio, it seems, is coasting along comfortably (or at least more comfortably then newspapers) atop the new media wave, or with the new media wave, where printed publications, important as they are, are struggling to find their place and meaning in an increasingly digital age.

That radio star just does not want to die.