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“We are not advocating that countries abandon sovereignty.”

September 22, 2009 by jkd

Thus does a large group of eminent scientists frame a pretty gloomy assessment (ScienceDaily summation here) of the failure of multilateral cooperation on a wide range of threats facing Earth, including,

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects

Depressingly, there’s nothing to argue with there. But the fact that the authors feel the need to follow the above with the caveat that they are not advocating for countries to abandon sovereignty is troubling for two reasons. First, that scientists are so jumpy about charges of elitism that they feel the need to preemptively defend against the insane (and inevitable) charges from cranks (e.g., some U.S. senators) that global warming is some kind of hoax being perpetuated in the service of a one-world government. Or something.

Secondly, the caveat makes me itch because the authors leave the door open substantially for something similar in their conclusion:

The institution of the nation-state has helped improve the well-being of many individuals, but at the cost of reduced global resilience. To address our common threats we need greater interaction among existing institutions, as well as new institutions, to help construct and maintain a global-scale social contract.

Their proposed solutions on global climate change, fisheries depletion and increased drug-resistance among drugs are to strengthen existing institutions (e.g., WHO) and introduce new institutions along similar lines (e.g., following the WTO). That’s fine as far as it goes, but the thrust of the editorial is to point out the failures of existing frameworks, and the frustration at free-rider problems and the inadequacy of current decision-making processes for addressing these issues. I don’t think it’s reading too many tea leaves to focus on this sentence and parse it out further:

The major powers must be willing to enforce agreements, but legitimacy will depend on acceptance by numerous and diverse countries and by nongovernmental actors, such as civil society and business. [emphasis mine]

I try not to get too paranoid about these things, but this taps pretty deeply into one of my fears with how the conversation on climate change is going to develop over the next 10-20 years. Scientists are rationalists and many are either very bad at or just can’t quite understand the functioning of politics (or are continually frustrated by the results – rightly so, often). Politics, indeed, isn’t very rational. And at the same time, for anyone who cares to look, we’re at a pretty grim moment for the continuance of human civilization along the lines which we’ve grown used to. Many scientists are getting pretty tired of pointing out this fact. As our institutions of shared collaborative decision-making (or not-making, as it may be) continue to dither in the face of planetary doom, it’s a great fear of mine that scientists will look for alternate means of addressing what they see (correctly) as increasingly dire climactic instability. In short, business: the actor with the means and motivation to address these issues on a massive scale, but not answerable to a larger (and often-annoying) polity. The thing is – and I’ve got plenty of dystopian SF narratives to back me up here! – it might work. Multinational corporate rule might save us from planetary self-destruction (or not), but at the great expense of human liberty.

I think that would be a Bad Thing. What would be a Good Thing, would be if scientists would get more engaged in politics. It’s a messy irrational business but that’s how it goes. Rather than pre-emptively defending themselves against Inhofian nonsense, why doesn’t a physics prof at the University of Oklahoma run against him? Or any and every other anti-science, climate-change-denying buffoon out there?

Would they win? Most likely not. But politics isn’t all about winning – or at least, not about winning one particular election. It’s about narratives, and the narrative of a widespread, grassroots effort from scientists to directly address the problems that they see  – rightly – as threatening our continued survival as a species would be a compelling one.

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“Creation” and the Comfort of Easy Conclusions

September 15, 2009 by jkd

This story got a lot of buzz on the web the other day, and has stayed in the news cycle since. The long and the short of it is this:

“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.”

That’s according to Jeremy Thomas, who produced the Charles Darwin biopic Creation, and that’s fine and all, but let’s put this into some perspective. He’s the film’s producer. That means that he’s making money off the film: indeed, that he’s on the hook for the financial success or failure of the film. I’m sure there are some people who’ve said it’s the best film they’re seen all year but, you know: my mom says I’m cool, too.

It’s possible that there’s some great conspiracy of film distributors – all film distributors in the United States, based largely in those hotbeds of conservatism, Hollywood and New York City – who support a right-wing, anti-science agenda, and who would spike a great film that would make them tons of money just to keep Americans ignorant of the true story of Charles Darwin.

Alternately, it’s also possible that the film is a low-key costume drama about a 19th C. English naturalist and his internal struggles. Or as the review of the film in Variety puts it:

“Creation” feels somewhat static in storytelling terms. Once basic conflicts are established, we simply wait for Darwin to come to terms with his grief, marriage and imminent notoriety. Not much “happens,” though the pic does its best to maintain energy in both physical presentation and mixed-chronology structure.

Leads are also a little monotonous: Bettany is appealing but this Charles is at times nearly a sickly bore, while Connelly, not an actor with much lightness, is OK but emphasizes Emma’s grave concern and disapproval to the exclusion of nearly every other quality.

In other words: maybe it’s just kind of a boring movie.

I know it’s fun to beat up on Americans for being a bunch of crazy know-nothings, to point out as the author of the Telegraph story did, that “only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution” and that there are message boards full of nutty anti-science kooks who call Darwin a Nazi, etc. It’s certainly a favorite past-time of many Britons, and there are a lot of folks here who get in on the game, too. And, you know: yeah, it’s pretty frustrating that there are so many Americans who are kinda nuts.

But let’s keep this in perspective. Hollywood likes to make money. Lots of it. They’re perfectly willing to produce and distribute eye-poking nonsense like Religulous – which the right wing was a lot more pissed off about – if they can count on $13 M receipts on a $2.5M budget, with a $3.5M opening weekend. That’s a very nice margin, and Religulous got pretty wide distribution to get there – not just indie theaters but a fair number of multiplexes, too, opening on over 500 screens and staying at over 400 screens for a month. There’s no way Creation opens that big, so to even approach those kinds of numbers, it’d have to not just do respectable business but really blow the doors off of the art-house circuit – sellouts, $60K screens, etc. – and given what it appears to be, I’m not really shocked that it failed to find a distributor willing to roll the dice.

We’re getting into Oscar season, both in big-budget and Oscar-bait-indie vintage. The screens are crowded and you need a pretty hot property to get into the conversation. The fact that Creation doesn’t rise to that level doesn’t say anything about Darwin’s theory of evolution being “too controversial for American audiences” and everything about some pretty banal economic realities of the movie biz.

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Selling the Footage

May 26, 2009 by jkd

Hunh:

A Russian Internet investment firm has invested $200 million in Facebook, giving the social networking company a cash buffer during the recession and pegging its value at $10 billion.Digital Sky Technologies, which has invested in leading Russian web properties like Mail.ru and Vkontakte.ru, will take a nearly 2 percent stake in Facebook in exchange for preferred stock, the two companies said on Tuesday.

…Digital Sky won because its founders Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger have strong experience running Internet properties in Eastern Europe and Russia, and “a deep, advanced understanding” of social networking technology, Zuckerberg said.

“Ultimately (it was) this deal and my comfort with Yuri and the team,” said Zuckerberg, 25, who founded Facebook in a Harvard University dorm room five years ago.

My immediate thoughts were that Yuri and Gregory must simply be frontmen for Hubertus Bigend, but that’s probably not right. Tumblr is much more Blue Ant’s speed.

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Education Reform

May 4, 2009 by jkd

Education reform means a lot of things, but one of the biggest problems is the gap in post-secondary educational opportunities (particularly the affordability of those opportunities) created by the staggering increases in cost for university education. President Obama wants to change this:

President Obama’s health-care goals may be garnering attention, but his higher-education proposals are no less ambitious.

…

At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice — a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-2008 school year.

…

He wants to terminate the private Federal Family Education Loan program, the primary source of student loans. Advocates say the move is a formality: The government already effectively controls the program by guaranteeing the loans, paying a special allowance to lenders, and in recent months, buying back loans by the billions from struggling firms.

Shifting all lending authority to the government through its Direct Loan program would save $94 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obama would use that windfall to expand the Pell Grant program, created in 1965 to cover most tuition costs for low-income students.

The Department of Education would not, actually, get a “near-monopoly” over college loans. Rather, the federal government would simply stop fully backing private loans – private lenders could continue to do whatever they wanted! The college loan industry – a large chunk of which exists as, essentially, a free government giveaway – responds by saying:

“The only reason they’re doing this is the government can make a lot of money,” said Kevin Bruns, executive director of the trade group America’s Student Loan Providers. “Private-sector lending built this entire industry, and now the federal government has piggybacked off of it.”

Kevin Burns, and the people he represents, are selfish jerks. The federal govenment does not “make a lot of money” off of college loans. The federal government is not a business. It is a collective trust that in this case is acting prudently in the specific interests of millions of citizens – in making college afforable for them – and more generally in the interests of all citizens, by making the U.S. a better-educated nation with more competitive workers and a more informed electorate. America’s Student Loan Providers did not build the entire industry, but rather have sucked at the government teat of totally-secured loans for decades, skimming pure profit without risk off the top. They are advocating for their own interests, of course, the “free money for us forever” lobby, but there’s no reason any of the rest of us should support that agenda.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D[ish]-NE) supports their agenda:

“It’s not just thinking about your state,” he said. “I have a fundamental difference in opinion thinking that all student aid ought to come from the government.”

Of course this proposes nothing of the sort – college loan providers are free to continue their business, just with a higher level of risk involved (which is to say in this case, any risk at all). It’s worth noting that Nelson also opposes expanding health care for Americans for similar reasons:

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

Nebraska is of course home to a number of large insurance companies that would stand to lose their sweet business model of “making gobs of money by making sure not to insure sick people.” And it’s further worth noting that, of course,

Nelson’s state is home to Nelnet, a Lincoln-based corporate loan provider that employs 1,000 people and that has contributed generously to his political campaigns.

So that’s fine, too. Just as long as it’s clear that Sen. Nelson favors the narrow interests of one company and their 1000 employees over the future lives and possibilities for millions of Americans and the nation’s long-term economic competitiveness, as well as favoring the interests of several other companies and several other thousands of people over the health and well-being of several tens of millions of Americans who lack health care. Because he has to represent his “constituents.”

Narrowing the gap in educational access is absolutely one of the most important possible steps towards creating a more just, egalitarian society. The G.I. Bill – along with a strong labor movement and a government willing to enforce labor laws – created the United States’ middle class and drove our prosperity in the half-century following WWII, by giving formerly poor people access to good education and good jobs. Similar measures on both fronts would do the same for the beginning of the 21st century.

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A Future Academic Discourse

March 26, 2009 by jkd

Phil Edwards pointed this morning to an excellent article from Inside Higher Ed on the impossibility of keeping up with current scholarship in academia, and asking what the way forward might be:

We have collectively created the equivalent of an academic monsoon over the past three decades, with no change in the forecast for the coming years. Without a major reconsideration of how we share and use information, how we keep up with the field, and how we recognize academic accomplishment, we will continue to add to the floodwaters, all the while spending less attention on whether or not anyone reads our work, listens to our presentations, or appreciates our professional contributions. Academe 2.0 offers tools to build more effective dikes and even to regulate the flow. But we need to realize that the lakes at the end of the bloated academic rivers – our faculty, researchers and students – have finite capacity, in terms of time and ability to assimilate information. Controlling the scholarly input is crucial to ensuring that we actually learn from and about each other, and ensuring that our academic work truly makes a difference.

Hill Taylor notes that the University of Michigan Press is moving away from monograph publishing and towards a digital approach, and that

uses and practices of literacy will change because of this too. Preferences for consumption and organization of such information will drive these new literacies. Of course, policy and pedagogy must recognize this change, driven by digital literacy, and accommodate accordingly.

While I’m not sure if this is a generalizable example, research into online activities does point out one way that we might square these circles. In my current research into tagging and folksonomies, many of the seminal piece of research and commentary – including the coining of the term “folksonomy” itself – occurred not in the pages of a peer-reviewed journal but in self-published and mediated online discussion: blogs, forums, mailing lists. Most of this was inherently dispensible, but some of it has stood the test of time, and what distinguishes the memorable from the forgettable is not the imprimatur of a journal’s nameplate but the usefulness of the information and analysis.

This is not a plea to abandon the peer-reviewed journal process – for the highest quality research, I believe it can and should serve a valuable purpose in disseminating knowledge. Rather, I would suggest that digital monographs and online self-publishing present a potentially better model for the actual exchange and construction of knowledge than a massive conference with an unreadable proceedings – the program referenced in the first piece above ran to 180 pages, never mind any of the papers presented. I am more likely to read, cite, and comment on a piece of scholarship if it’s actually available to me, and pushing out digital monographs via non-DRM’d .pdfs is a better model of accessibility than far-flung conferences with dozens or hundreds of unattendable sessions.

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Post-Interstitiality

March 18, 2009 by jkd

Bill Gibson:

…New York having been in those days seemingly not a part of the United States but something simultaneously autonomous and interstitially abandoned.

When I first visited New York as an adult (so to speak) at the start of my writing career, it seemed to me that it couldn’t possibly go on, that way. All of it, I suggested to the supposedly futuristically-concerned New Yorkers I was meeting there, would one day be equally unaffordable, post-interstitial. As Jack would soon have it, Regooded. At which suggestion I was invariably recognized as a hick from Hickograd.

But lo.

Not just an I-told-you-so moment, this brings up an important point – every interstitial is followed by a new solidity; every post-____ism concedes its ism the status quo, and acknowledges that it will be, one day, the same as what came before: irrelevant.

This is something to keep in mind during our current transitive, liminal, interstitial moment. Terrible and wonderful things are happening, will happen, but out on the other side of tomorrow things will be different. Whatever else happens, things will stabilize into something, better and worse and mostly else.

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Facebook and Who We Want to Be

March 16, 2009 by jkd

Nicole Ellison has a good post on the uses of Facebook as identity affordance over time, and puts very nicely the sentiment that,

this expanded social network of people from one’s history as a supportive presence that enables individuals to stretch, knowing that they have links to their past should they need them.

Ongoing research I’m doing with Terrell Russell examines user perceptions of time and the life-cycle of information, and this adds another useful perspective. But there’s yet another aspect to keep in mind: the way in which our networks don’t limit who we are, but keep us honest on who we hope to be. I haven’t seen research quantifying this, and I’m not quite sure how you’d do it at any rate. But it’s my big hunch that one of the best aspects of explicating social networks online, and making behaviors public and observable (even if we’re modulating privacy settings) is that we are aware we’ll be held accountable for who we think we should be by those closest to us. It doesn’t even have to be explicit, just the knowledge in the back of our minds that we’re being watched on some level by those we we have chosen to support the norms of our created communities is, I think, an important function.

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Do Something Good

March 2, 2009 by jkd

Rob Walker has a recent column in Slate with a provocative suggestion:

Why do agencies need to go find a client that has ideas about social or environmental responsibility? Don’t the smart folks at the agencies have any such ideas of their own? Well, then, pick one, forget about finding a client, and go out there and use your persuasion skills to make a positive change in the world.

…

Such a campaign might actually help the overall image of your profession—you know, how mostly what you do is create the endless barrage of sales pitches that encouraged Americans to spend way beyond their means. (Congrats on your success with that, by the way.) Maybe you’d have a convincing case study to point to that shows your profession—or your agency, at least—has something going for it besides innovation and smarts: actual values.

This picks up on an idea that he floated in his own blog that I’d been meaning to discuss further, earlier, and will now. The basic thrust is an important one for all of us to internalize as the structure of our economy and society, er, “re-arranges.

Robert Putnam made far too much of the collapse of community in the United States by tracking the decrease in bowling leagues and voluntary organizations. But there’s certainly something going on there, and part of what it is, is a shift in the sense of community and responsibility from a very local, conservative and exclusionary one – my town, full of people like me – toward a more global awareness and sense of responsibility. There’s a trade-off here, to be sure, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the rise of the non-profit sector in the United States over the last generation is a basically bad thing, even if it may owe something to the decline in Elks Lodges.

But this can go too far, and as with many other things there’s been a tendency for “responsibility” to become just another consumption line-item: put your donation to WWF/ACLU/MoveOn/NPR/etc. on the plastic, get your bumper sticker and tote bag as public display of responsible citizenship, and move on to other things.

There’s been a growing awareness in the non-profit community for some time – even before the current economic downturn (the bursting of the first dot.com bubble was a big wake-up for many non-profits) – that while a membership-driven responsibility-consumption funding model does disintermediate the gatekeeper function of the big foundations, it also leaves something to be desired in terms of long-term sustainability.

Our current predicament illustrates this quite nicely. While the marginal value – and need – for charitable donations is never higher for non-profits than in times of trouble, the exact opposite is true for citizens. When you have a red-lining credit-card bill – credit limit decreasing every time you pay dow the outstanding balance, and minimum payments and penalties increasing – teamed with increasingly-unsustainable mortgage paymenets, rising food costs, and the threat or reality of unemployment, the decision to cut out feel-good charitable donations or buy enough dried beans for the week is not a tough one.

But our current predicament also illustrates the need for more good works, not fewer – for a mindset focused on tangible human capital rather than illusory financial capital. A societal focus on maximization of dollar-value has landed us where we are, and jsut scrapping by on the crap-end of that stick is not going to get us out. Not in any way we can be proud of, at any rate.

I will not pretend for a second that this is a silver-lining situation: real pain is here for many people, more is coming, and the bottom is not in sight, yet. But a simple fact that nearly all of us share is this: whether through involuntary un(der)employment or tighter budgets for entertainment and restaurants, most of us are going to have more free time on our hands. So: do something good with it. Build something – use whatever talents you have to bring something good into the world that wasn’t there before, to share it with people and to encourage others to do the same. It could be something big, like Rob suggests – a marketing campaign or a new good product – or something small, like making food for your friends.

But do something. One of the true virtues of times of disruptive change is that barriers to action and new ideas are much, much lower. When things are going fine, most people would just as soon let them be, but when the fundamental tenets of society are called into question on a daily basis: well, why not do things differently?

…

Postscript: It’s snowing again in Carrboro, and that doesn’t mean anything in particular, but there’s a nice picture from my back porch this morning. snow-day

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Context and Power

February 2, 2009 by jkd

Charles Platt, guest-blogging at BoingBoing, shared the following:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world’s largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn’t ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

…

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be. My supervisor was friendly, decent, and treated me as an equal. Wal-Mart allowed a liberal dress code. The company explained precisely what it expected from its employees, and adhered to this policy in every detail. I was unfailingly reminded to take paid rest breaks, and was also encouraged to take fully paid time, whenever I felt like it, to study topics such as job safety and customer relations via a series of well-produced interactive courses on computers in a room at the back of the store. Each successfully completed course added an increment to my hourly wage, a policy which Barbara Ehrenreich somehow forgot to mention in her book.

…

Somehow that kind of news is never as popular as denunciations of the free market written by professional handwringers such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

Charles Platt, like the vast majority of WalMart’s management – senior corporate headquarters, store-located, everything – is a white man. Perhaps this difference between himself and Ehrenreich crossed his mind and he chose to ignore it, or maybe it never came up. But to point out the very obvious: white men have a massively disproportionate about of power in the United States. Whites generally have the lower rate of unemployment and higher rate of compensation; white men have higher rates of compensation and lower rates of unemployment than white women. Non-Hispanic white men comprise ~34% of the U.S. population and the era of Obama notwithstanding, continue to control the vast, vast majority of U.S. wealth, political, cultural, [FILL IN THE BLANK] power.

Platt isn’t a racist for not acknowledging these issues, nor a misogynist, nor do I claim any particular valor for foregrounding my white male privilege. It’s a marker of how ingrained and powerful that privilege is that an intelligent guy like Platt – a man who’s made his bread as writer and cultural observer for going on 40 years – could be quite so blind to it. The most revealing turn of phrase in his account is when Platt acknowledges that “Somehow [Ehrenreich's] book didn’t ring true to me.” Well of course it didn’t – that’s kind of the point. It’s not about Platt – it’s about the two-thirds of the population (more, when you take into account class distinctions) that aren’t Platt and don’t have his built-in racial and/or gender advatages.

More in-depth treatment of other issues of race and achievement later this week, but this kind of set me off.

Posted in identity | Tagged | 2 Comments »

Podcasts and Radio – More on the Future of Media

January 30, 2009 by jkd

In his most recent online chat, Bill Simmons offered the following exchange:

PeteFitz (chicago): Mr. Sportsguy, Any reason for the podcasts over the columns these last two weeks? I personally like the columns better (for selfish reasons, I like to read at work), so I was wondering if there was a specific reason.

Bill Simmons: (12:50 PM ET ) Again, I am desperatrely trying to finish my book – so that’s one reason, I only have so many writing hours in me each day. The other reason is that I love doing the podcasts and feel like I’m on the ground floor of a medium that is really starting to take off. It’s like radio on demand and I think it’s going to kill satellite radio in 2 years. I really do. It’s also a huge threat to real radio in my opinion, especially when people can get internet in their cars and can just cue podcasts up within 3 clicks. It’s astonishing to me that nobody has written a long piece about podcasts yet. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened with sportswriting in the late-90s where nobody was taking the internet seriously and suddenly within 7 years there were a million sports blogs, mainstream sites were crushing newspapers and newspapers were hemorrhaging money. We are headed that way with podcasts. I just think radio is going to become much more niche-oriented over these next 10 years… people don’t see it yet. Christian Slater in “Pump Up The Volume” is going to look like a genius.

Bill’s a smart guy, and he’s obviously got a horse in this fight, so I’ll forgive him a bit of rose-tinted boosterism here. The death of radio has been confidently predicted for the better part of the last half-century to no avail, because what fans of [INSERT COMPETING MEDIA HERE] don’t quite get is just what it is that radio does or is. Radio is at base a very low-bandwidth media – you click it on and it’s there, and you can listen to it or not but can also be doing any one of a number of things (e.g., driving a car, cooking, working, etc.) and radio doesn’t get in the way. TV, the Internet and even podcasts demand more attention from the audience – you have to watch TV, read (or watch) the Internet and with podcasts, there’s the matter of a multi-click process of finding and then selecting the desired program. Those three clicks are a lot more important than Simmons allows for, because you have to think before and during them – radio doesn’t ask that.

This isn’t to say that radio is going to be unchanged  by the introduction of the Internet and podcasts (which radio developed a fancy word for a long time ago, “programs”). Before the introduction of TV, dramas and comedies dominated radio – they don’t anymore, but people still listen to radio. After a long period of domination by music, the 1980s through the present saw the rise and increasing dominance of the radio airwaves by talk and news radio – NPR is at least as big a success in this regard as the right-wing talkers. And maybe the large and still-increasing relevance of online news and commentary means that there’ll be a bite out of that audience. But that won’t be the end of radio, either.

What will happen – because it’s already happening – is that there’s going to be much more of a dialogue between radio and podcasts. Because radio producers haven’t had the same hang-ups about intellectual property as TV or the movie or record industry – they’re already giving their product away free and over the air – they’ve been very well-positioned to move online, and NPR has been among the best in this regard. Taking a look at the iTunes store’s (yes, yes, but it’s not unrepresentative) top-25 downloaded podcasts, fully seven of them are produced by NPR. Eight others are produced by the mainstream media; two are President Obama’s weekly address; one is produced by iTunes, another is ringtones, and only six can really properly be called Internet-based podcasts (including the Onion). Similarly, music blogs are now moving onto radio – Sirius’ XMU channel features several hours a week of music bloggers on their Blog Radio feature, which is a good deal for both – low production costs for Sirius, and more exposure for the music bloggers.

Radio is a channel, a low-commitment, low-bandwidth channel that’s good for passive interaction and has a huge installed base of receivers that isn’t going anywhere (to wit: what car manufacturer is going to go all Apple and be the first to take the radio out of the car?). I’ll allow – and hope! – that the Internet and podcasts might turn out to be good for radio by showing that there are large audiences for audio content outside of the current top-40/urban/country/Latino/classic rock/right-wing-talk/sports talk/NPR selection of channels (go on – try to find more than a few examples of major-market broadcast radio stations that don’t fit one of those). Or it could just work to reinforce the dominance of current audio content producers by giving them another another opportunity to disseminate their content. Most likely, a bit of both. But radio isn’t going away.

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