Radio

When I first selected the postmodern miracle that is "Shuffle All" on my first (and last) iPod, I had the same reaction many people had: It's like my own personal radio station! Lewis Black described this feeling as akin to "the man who first created fire," comparing it unfavorably to the complex mechanisms necessary to switch between tracks on a record player. In 2002, the year the iPod and digital music as a whole really took off, SPIN Magazine dubbed the DJ of the Year "you", four years before TIME magazine made that sort of thing cool.

But it is the connection to radio that I find most interesting. Music radio plays an odd part in most people's pop culture repertoire. It continues to be the main source of learning what music is popular (surviving the relatively brief span of time MTV dominated that role) and yet most people seem to encounter it by chance, in the car or at the gym. It is not, like broadcast television remains (even if dwindling in that capacity), something people typically make a conscious decision to do other than to have something in the background. According to a 2009 study by the "Council For Research Excellence" (which, despite its innocuous name, is totally not a CIA front company), broadcast radio accounts for 79% of all audio media we encounter throughout our day (that includes both terrestrial and satellite radio). Here's the breakdown:

Exposure to audio listening falls into four tiers in terms of level of usage among listeners: (1) broadcast & satellite radio (79.1% daily reach; 122 minutes daily use among users), (2) CDs and tapes (37.1% daily reach; 72 minutes); (3) portable audio [ipods/MP3 players] ( 11.6% daily reach; 69minutes), digital audio stored on a computer such as music files downloaded or transferred to and played on a computer (10.4% daily reach; 65 minutes average use), and digital audio streamed on a computer (9.3% daily reach; 67 minutes) and (4) audio on mobile phones (<2% daily reach; 9 minutes).

The number for mobile phones is the only one I find suspicious, as everyone knows any phone that can play music has a max battery life of 8 minutes.

So nearly 10 years after digital media players became commonplace, and several years after USB ports became standard equipment in most vehicles, broadcast radio still dominates the listening spectrum. If you are not astonished by this, consider the lifespan of radio; it is second only to land-line telephones as the oldest standard for telecommunications in history. In fact, the only thing as shocking as radio's place on top of this study is the Silver Medal going to CD's--and even tapes-- which have only been around 30 years compared to the century of radio.

The study notes that only 10% of people listening to the radio were doing nothing else but listening to the radio--most were busy with work or some other activity (44% of radio listening is done while commuting). This is important if discussing the role of radio. I've recently become enamored with the website 8tracks.com, which allows users to upload a playlist and for others, even nonmembers, to listen in.  Of the Top 5 tags for user-created playlists, 3 describe an activity the playlist is made for rather than the music itself: "Sleep", "sex", and "study", in that order. MP3 players, as well, are usually found around the armbands of early morning joggers or in the cup-holders of early-morning commuters.

Broadcast radio is uniquely fit to play the role of background music: it's constant, free, and everywhere. In most radio markets, every station runs 24 hours. And despite the complete and utter scam that is HD radio, radio remains free and radio units themselves remain extremely cheap. Because of these two factors, radio is unavoidable. It's the most cost-effective and reliable method of tuning out the real world.

As it turns out, being the soundtrack to our own mundane thoughts and habits is good business. NPR, whose continued existence in the face of the 24-hour infotainment onslaught is itself astonishing, has shown steady growth over the same decade people turned more and more to cable TV and online sources for news. In a study published just this week by Arbitron, an international media analysis firm, weekly radio listeners increased by 1.4 million over the course of 2011. Again, we're talking about a century-old technology with absolutely no screen whatsoever growing against the same odds and technological waves currently crushing print media. Not bad for a box the size of a textbook shoved into my dashboard.

In an earlier post, I discussed the dying nature of television. While TV is quite passive, it does require the use of the eyes, which can be distracting when looking for something to fade in and out of during work, working out, or driving. Unlike TV, the radio transitions fairly naturally to portability. And as any music nerd can tell you, even a fully-loaded iPod can become fairly predictable. Radio can bring you traffic and weather, brand new music of nearly any genre, the oddball personalities of disc jockeys, and the sense that a million or more people could be listening to the same thing at the same moment you are (I believe sociologists call this term "community"). So while TV and magazines may die out to the Internet's persistent evolution, radio continues to be your oldest co-worker, turning down the chance to quit and still outpacing the new hires.

Citizens

The story of social progress in the United States tends to be the upward slope of who is defined as a "citizen." First, of course, it was white male landowners, followed by merely white males. 1865, the Civil War ends, and the 15th Amendment enfranchises all men, regardless of race or place of origin. Of course, the enforcement of the 15th amendment was paltry after less than a decade, but during that decade black men were elected to offices both national and local (Barack Obama was only the fifth black Senator, but one of three black Senators from Illinois). What followed has been called the racial "Nadir", meaning a time when race relations were cold and segregation, de facto or otherwise, became the norm. Literacy tests and poll taxes were specifically constructed to keep blacks and immigrants from voting (not to mention some extralegal methods of scaring people away from polls). The turn of the 20th century saw many states allowing women to vote with a national campaign resulting in the 19th Amendment. So, today, if you are a registered citizen of the United States, you can vote, free-of-charge. It's as close to universal suffrage as a modern society has ever been.

Of course, there are an estimated 17 million undocumented immigrants who, presumably, can not and do not vote (though many obtain an SSI card and driver's license, giving them the materials to register). Then there are the several million people below the age of 18 who work and pay taxes without representation. Followed closely by the 5.3 million Americans who have been convicted of a felony and, therefore, are banned from voting. And all of this relies on a School House Rock image of government and elections. The 2000 presidential election introduced an entire generation to the complex machinations of the electoral college, and the fact that three presidents (7% of presidents) in our history have won without the majority of votes. The electoral college is the lasting memorial to the fear of the masses found within the writings and opinions of that holy group, the Founding Fathers. Any AP Government student can tell you senators used to be chosen by state legislatures, not by direct elections, because the Senate is meant to be a collection of wise-folk to foil the raucous rabble of the directly-elected House. We do not elect our presidents by popular vote because we are not meant to, are not trusted to.

Then there's the way votes are obtained. Let's put aside stuffed ballot boxes. Let's put aside such prevalent and illegal practices such as caging, voter intimidation, and misleading voters as to the location and time of polls. Even if an election is run in the most legal manner possible, the undue influences of old power models and corporate institutions are unavoidable. Corporations have been making donations to political parties and PACs long before Citizens United made it fashionable. The old tactics, known as "soft money", are so called because their use can be decided by the party at hand (usually distributed amongst individual campaigns, even though it's not supposed to). Funding is not just needed to run a campaign; it is, in effect, the entire campaign. A common theme in primary campaigns is a candidate who may be polling well but cannot get the money to continue. Herman Cain ran into this problem. He started with a abysmally low funding and polling to match. As his polls went up, however, his funding did not. This is due to a vast number of reasons, but it essentially comes down to that mysterious quality we call "electability". Investing in a campaign is not like investing in a company; you can't collect and withdraw at your own whim, regardless of the companies long-term sustainability. A candidate needs to win in order for you to see returns in the form of favorable policy.

Now, as Mitt Romney tells me, corporations are people. We now have surpassed the goals of the Enlightenment and entered a new phase of granting civil rights to institutions. A corporation cannot go to the local high school or civic center and pull the lever for a candidate (yet). But why would it want to? We, as citizens, vote because it is the most direct way we can influence politicians. Most politically-active corporations have far deeper pockets than any individual and therefore can have far more influence than a single vote provides. By acting as the fuel for a campaign's spin cycle, a corporation can effectively become the campaign, as Stephen Colbert has been beautifully illustrating with his very own SuperPAC.

Citizens United did not grant corporations the enfranchisement people enjoy; it actually decreased the value and power of a single vote by forcing people to compete with wallets far fatter than we can hope to obtain. I started this post by talking about the increasing equality of enfranchisement through American history. Voting began as a tool for property-owning men to protect their property. But, because laws affect everyone and not just property owners, the right to vote, through 200 years of policy and evolution, spread to all American adults. Now we see that progress being pulled backwards. We could learn quite a bit from the European serfs of the Middle Ages. After all, who do you turn to when the bank owns your house, your car, your education, and now your government? We are beholden to faceless lords who face no regulations, no trials, and no elections. With such status, we can hardly be called "citizens."