Radio
I was thinking last weekend about how our lives have turned into content roulette, whether it's streaming, video on demand, the Internet, Instagram, or Tik Tok. You can't even visit a web page anymore without getting hit up to go to another web page before you've even looked at the first one.Entertainment has turned into a retail store, with exactly the same approach. All any entertainment provider wants is inventory turnover. They don't care what you're watching, as long as they lead you to watch something else.
This has had a profound impact on our lives.
I'm sure all of us have times where our minds our racing because we consume content so quickly, with an ocean of more content waiting.
I wondered where all this began, and decided it was radio.
Before radio--and more specifically--before there were multiple stations on the radio, there was no way to quickly switch between content. It was a concept that didn't exist. Content was consumed in large chunks, one chunk at a time.
Then radio came, and you could turn the dial between multiple radio stations.
Then television, then cable television, then satellite television.
This happened slowly, then all at once. In a span of twenty years, we went from three television channels to over fifty. After another twenty years, the channel count is in the hundreds, alongside streaming video, unlimited information (much of it wrong) on the Internet, and streaming music (where you can listen to everything anyone ever recorded, seemingly).
I've been wondering if I could untether myself from the Internet for certain periods during the year, just to be able to write better.
In truth, I doubt it. Thanks, radio.
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