Cyber-Silly?

I suppose I sometimes sound like an old grump when I wonder whether or not everything on the web is an unalloyed good. Or maybe a wee bit hypocritical, since this is a blog and it wouldn't exist except for the web. People who have no web access will never be able to read it! And to answer your question, my door still stands, unbeaten-down by the hordes of web-less folks demanding access to airport-novel reviews, Firefly-inspired rants and grouchy ramblings.

I do wonder, though, whether we are really giving ourselves the time to think through the changes and such that moves to the all-digital realm bring about. This long article for The Nation highlights some of the problems that come from believing such changes are only good and have no down side.

Recently, my favorite local radio station, The Spy, left the airwaves and went to web-only content. The station manager felt the company offering to sell him their transmitter was charging more than it was worth and decided to make that change rather than spend too much on something that was assessed at a lower value than the asking price. There's really no room to quarrel with a decision like that; it's his money and even if it hadn't been, how do you argue with a responsible decision like not paying inflated prices?

Since it's web-only, that means no listening in the car. Unless, as the station's many Facebook fans suggest, you use the iPhone app to get the signal and them plug your phone into your car's sound system. And other smartphone apps are on the way! And then car stereos will start including 4G streaming as a part of their system. And if Obama's universal 4G plan passes, it can be everywhere! When? How? For whom? We don't know, but it will be really cool. And so on and so on, adding more and more what-ifs that, should they happen, will turn the currently exclusivist web-only format --that needs you to buy a new phone or a new stereo or a new car or whatever -- into something that resembles the far more inclusive format of broadcast radio. Right now, a significant portion of the web and its benefits remain the province of the relatively wealthy. Sure, a homeless person can get online through a local library, but any community that can afford a library with power, computers and internet access is wealthy by the world's standards.

But aside from that, there's the loss of the happy accident you might have of searching along the radio dial and finding something really interesting. Few radio dials anyplace offer that anymore, to be sure, as preprogrammed formats safely hide behind consultant-created playlists. The difference is that to listen to online content, you have to already know about it and point your web browser there. I might have been scanning my dial and found The Spy when I was intrigued by, say, the version of Camera Obscura's "French Navy" that they recorded at the station's studios. But not now. Now, I don't have to search and seek to discover something; I just click what I already know online and there it is.

Is the loss of unexpected discovery in radio the worst thing? Probably not, but there are other changes an all-digital world will bring that will have a much bigger impact. Is it possible that new formats will offer benefits that outweigh that loss or create new avenues for those kinds of discoveries? Perhaps so. But if not, will we be able to recover what we lost? I don't know, and it doesn't seem like many other people, a lot smarter than I am, know either. Maybe we should start asking.