I am tumbling this post.

For anyone who's looked at my sidebars, you may have noticed a link called My music blog, sort of. It's hosted on a site called tumblr. While looking over some of the things I've written about on this blog, I realized that I've mentioned tumblr several times here, without explaining what it is.

It's hard to define tumblr, even if you have one; I would describe it as a simplified microblogging site with a strong social networking aspect. The creators of tumblr must have looked at what people blogged about most with traditional sites such as Blogger or LiveJournal -- text, conversations, links, audio, video, and photos -- and tumblr posts are geared towards this kind of media referencing. One post does not fit all; before you update your tumblr, you first have to decide whether the post will be Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, or Video. What you write is largely determined by what you're writing about.

I like my tumblr. (So much, in fact, that it was one of the four sites I gave up for a month earlier this semester.) It simplifies the blogging process, which is great for users like me who aren't too tech-savvy and can't be bothered to learn HTML. Of course, I can see how more involved bloggers would feel boxed in with this kind of format; if your post doesn't fall into one of the seven categories mentioned above, tough luck. 

But tumblr differs from sites like Blogger with one key feature: "reblogging." If you particularly like someone's tumblr post, there's a little "Reblog" button in the top right-hand corner. One click, and the post is reproduced on your own blog (with a link to your friend's site). You can even add your own commentary on the original post, in lieu of commenting directly on your friend's site (a feature which doesn't exist on tumblr). 

In my opinion, the reblogging tool is the most groundbreaking feature of tumblr. Instead of restricting your friend's content and your reaction to it to your friend's site, it is displayed right alongside your posts. In short, the content becomes your own. It's the next step after Facebook or MySpace, where your favorite books, movies, and bands precede you -- if not define you.

Another notable thing about tumblr: It's still in the early stages, which means it draws a certain audience, who in turn subscribe to a certain aesthetic. My friend Patrick put it best in his second post: the people who get tumblrs are usually "self-aware hipsters." At least for now, the point of having a tumblr is to display your knowledge of the internet, so a lot of the posts turn into "my content is cooler than your content" contests. And as the site is in the early adopter phase, so people who "tumble" are more focused on what's cool than they are on personal expression.

I think twitter and tumblr are two branches of the same phenomenon: simplifying the internet tools we already have. Our class mostly agrees that twitter is a waste of time, or at the very least a flash in the pan -- but what do you guys think about tumblr? A short-lived fad, or the next pillar of the web?

Twitter Flu

Last week was rough -- I had a giant presentation to give on Friday, and I spent all week working on it. I didn't sleep very much, and what started out as a minor cold on Tuesday had grown into two ear infections, pinkeye, a completely stuffed-up nose, a sore throat, and no voice whatsoever by Saturday. Lame.
My friend in New York also happened to get sick this weekend. We stayed in our respective bedrooms, occasionally texting one another about soup or tea or the movies we finally got around to watching. "My roommates think I have swine flu," she joked. I had been hearing the bad, then worsening news about the spread of swine flu every time I checked my Yahoo! email account, but these articles were from official press outlets. I wondered if they were sensationalizing (or understating) the public's reaction to this potential pandemic. Curious, I went back to Twitter Search to see just what the Twittering population was saying.

Some sample quotes:

"If i get the swine flu Ima be more upset to use the adjective "swine" to describe myself then i will be about the possibility of dying!"

"I have a scratchy throat which normally I wouldn't think twice about except this stupid swine flu crap that is going around..."

"@mileycyrus OMG MILEY YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL!! ALWAYS WASH YOUR HANDS PLEASEEEEEEE I DONT WANT YOU TO GET THE SWINE FLU AND ALOT OF PEOPLE"

"Does the swine flu mean no more bacon double cheeseburgers?"

And my personal favorite: "i think i have swan flu"

So even though some commentators think that twittering about swine flu spreads more panic than it does information, I'd have to disagree. Twitter is just coming out of the early adopter stage, which means that the people who use it the most are the under-30 crowd. And frankly, most of us aren't taking it that seriously. I saw more updates where friends joked about getting swine flu than I did alarmist messages (or impassioned advice to Miley Cyrus).

The AlloSphere: getting inside your head

Last week, we looked at treemaps (and how they're used on the website smartmoney.com to graphically represent how stocks are doing in the market). I had always seen my dad looking at the cryptic red and green bricks under the guise of "checking our investments," but I never understood just what the graphs meant. The graphics seemed so far removed from the x-axis/y-axis graphs I had learned about in school that I didn't ask my dad to explain them.

But when treemaps were explained in class last week, the concept seemed almost second-nature. Of course, it makes sense that larger bricks represent larger stocks, green means up, and red means down. A good statistical representation should make sense, and a great graphical representation should make sense and have an inherently beautiful form.

I have a friend who really knows his TED talks, and posts his favorites on Facebook. That's how I came across a particularly elegant way to represent data: the AlloSphere. Described by composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin as "a large, dynamically varying, digital microscope," the AlloSphere lets you literally get inside of data by standing inside a giant, spherical screen while listening to data represented as sound over time (music). There are several examples and demonstrations given in the talk, though the one that stuck with me was the notion of surgeons being able to "fly into the brain as if it was a world and see tissues as landscapes and hear blood density levels as music."

The AlloSphere is impressive, and at first glance, it seems as if nothing like this has existed before. But when you think about it, this is just like our traditional forms of data represenation -- just taken to a new level. The same kind of mental leap must have existed for the inventor of the stem-and-leaf-plot, or the pictograph. It's the same concept of seeing facts without actually seeing facts.

I was also struck by how this relates to the new media concepts we've been discussing in class: is Skyping really the same as talking to someone face-to-face? When you write a message on someone's Facebook wall, is it just like telling them in person? Technologies in both realms of data representation and online networking are trying to move in the same direction: making the unreal more real. Strictly speaking, Skype is software and the AlloSphere is a computer. But both strive to make virtual reality more like reality.

Coming back to social networks

As I wrote a few posts ago, my friend and I recently decided to take a month off the social networking
parts of the Internet. We decided that sites like Facebook, tumblr, last.fm, and Twitter were making our lives too complicated, and affecting the way we perceived ourselves (since everything we wrote could be viewed by large numbers of people).

Well, the month ended last Thursday, on April 9th. I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the experience:
- My friends' reactions were pretty interesting. One friend got angry: "Do you know how painful it is to see one’s measly 244 friend count drop to 242? You should warn me!” And another one was hurt: "I’m blocked from your Facebook. Is it something I did?”
- I was a lot more focused in getting my work done -- I didn't have the option of switching back and forth between the essay window and my Facebook window.
- I felt like I got to know people in a different way. I'm naturally an introvert, so I value one-on-one conversations more than I do large announcements (which I'm sure played a role in inspiring me to do the experiment to begin with). I found myself getting to know people I had assumed I "knew" because I was Facebook friends with them.
- I thought that leaving last.fm would cause me to listen to music in a different way -- I wouldn't be waiting for tracks to "scrobble" to a public profile. However, my listening habits didn't change. I listened to the same bands, and the same quantity of music.
- My phone plan? Allows 250 texts/month. My month off from Facebook? I used 502. Whoops.
- I didn't miss Twitter at all. In fact, I haven't logged back in, and I don't plan to.
- I didn't plan it this way, but the month overlapped with Spring Break (3/15-3/21) as well as my birthday (3/31). One would think I "missed" a lot of hanging out with old friends over break, and "missed" the slew of birthday wishes that show up on everyone's Facebook. But I was super busy over break, and my birthday felt more special when it was just the dozen or so friends who remembered.

My friend ended up going back to Facebook and Twitter after a couple of weeks; but as I said earlier, she's an intern at Newsweek and needed to find contacts for a story. (That, I think, says something about how much these social networking sites are a part of our lives.) I stayed away for the whole time, and I don't recall ever missing Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, or tumblr. However, that could be because I knew I was only going to be gone for a month.

In the end, I'm glad I took the month off. It convinced me that I don't rely on the internet to have a meaningful life (in fact, some dimensions of my life grew away from the computer), and it reminded me that I always have control over my relationship with new technology. Everyone should have that feeling.

Neither good nor bad

"We offer two basic morals. The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad—it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates."
from Blown to Bits by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis

I completely agree with this sentiment, and I think it sums up what we've talked about here in HONR229F. A lot of our class discussions revolve around whether new technologies invade our privacy and provide information overload, or make our lives better and simply replace already-existing forms of communication. It's tempting to assign qualities of "good" or "bad" to the internet, as any kind of revolution topples the old forms in favor of the new. But I think it's a temptation we should avoid, because regardless of what we think of them, new technologies inevitably overtake the old. This is the competitive principle we've built our society on -- if someone has an idea for something better than what exists, we should embrace it and allow that idea to grow. Trying to assess the "opportunities" themselves is wrong, not to mention impossible.

I also believe we are collectively responsible for the use of these technologies. There's a delicate balance between how a tool is used, and how its construction demands it be used, but I think our tendency is to underestimate our power in these matters. Whether Second Life, for example, becomes a learning community or a pornographic playground is ultimately up to us. Now if only we could all agree...

CADIE

Every year, millions of people play pranks on their friends, family, and co-workers as part of April Fool's Day (incidentally, the day after my birthday -- phew, that was close!) The pranks range from simple to the cruel and elaborate. However, I'm most drawn to the large-scale pranks, such as those carried out by NPR, that don't cause any physical or psychological harm -- while still fooling the masses.

While I didn't get pranked myself this past April Fool's, I did check the Google blog several times throughout the day, anticipating Google's yearly tradition of announcing a new, fake tool. (Given Google's out-of-the-box thinking and rapid rate of development, I've certainly taken these "tools" seriously before.) And I wasn't disappointed: yesterday, Google introduced CADIE, an eerily HALesque "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity" which associated itself with the image of a panda. Of course, CADIE was much more than a panda -- as posts from her (now-removed) blog revealed, she was growing in both intelligence and maturity, surpassing her creators in a single day. As the Google blog ominously concluded, "It seems CADIE has a mind of her own..."

In a matter of hours, CADIE found some improvement to make for nearly every Google tool, such as Brain Search for your phone and making Chrome available in 3D. Though I already knew that this was an April Fool's Day prank, I wondered how someone would take these "developments" seriously -- the notion of a computer (or CADIE) running the world seems so outdated, the stuff of mid-century sci-fi. Even for someone who had forgotten it was April Fool's Day, the whole thing seemed a little ridiculous.

As I thought more about it, I realized that our generation seems more concerned with how other people behave. Our class discussion on the digitization of medical records, for example, revealed that we worry about the government and large corporations far more than we worry about some sentient computer. It's important to keep in mind that with any user-based technology (such as Google), the most significant factor is the users themselves.

Online togetherness

My last post described how I'll be taking some time off from social networking sites for a while. I'm still continuing the experiment, and once the month is up (April 9th), I'll write a decent post about my experiences. I'm mentioning the experiment, however, because it hinges on one assumption: that using these social networking sites makes people uneasy and that having one online profile to represent you is unnatural.

It's a pretty one-sided assumption to make.

So to avoid coming off as one of those culture critics who only see the Internet as evil, I've decided to devote today's post to... PostSecret!

Most of you college kids already know what PostSecret is, but for the uninitiated: PostSecret is a blog of sorts, run by Frank Warren. It started off as a small community art project where people were asked to anonymously mail in postcards with a secret, but word traveled and the project expanded to include postcards from all over the world. Every Sunday, Frank Warren posts a selection of the week's postcards on his website. Four years, four books, and several nationwide tours later, PostSecret is still in the top twenty most popular blogs.

What I like about PostSecret is its ability to bring people together in a truly anonymous way. Frank Warren has comments disabled for the blog itself (though there is a PostSecret Forum at a different URL, for those inclined to discuss the secrets with others online). However, I'm not a member of the forum, and my involvement with PostSecret goes no further than reading it every week. (No, I haven't even mailed in my own secret! :) ) My own PostSecret experience is a passive one -- I'm able to appreciate the site without having to contribute anything to it. No username, no profile, nothing.

Of course, there are different degrees of involvement with the site. While I've been a mostly passive participant, PostSecret becomes "interactive" media when someone mails in a postcard, sends an email to Warren, or posts in the forums.

In the end, I enjoy PostSecret for its flexibility: it is a fairly emotional form of entertainment that can be as anonymous or participatory as you want it to be.

Options

tumblr
My good friend, who is currently an intern at Newsweek, called me up two nights ago. After I caught her up on the more mundane details of my life, we turned to discussing the internet: "Take a look at my tumblr," she said. "How does it seem to you? I'm worried that I'm coming off as too scatter-brained, like an nineteen-year-old kid who doesn't have her tastes together. It's not cohesive enough, it doesn't have the right aesthetic."
"Well, you are a nineteen-year-old kid. And why are you worrying about aesthetic? Who reads this, anyway?" I asked.
"The people at Newsweek. The ones I really want to impress."

Facebook
"I'm worried about how I come off on my Facebook," I continued.
"What do you mean?"
"I made some new friends this weekend, and they wrote on my wall about certain things that I wouldn't want employers to see. Now I have two choices: I can either delete the wall posts (and risk alienating the people who wrote them), or I can leave them up (and take the chance that an employer might deny me a job.)"

LiveJournal
"Yeah, I guess I don't have that problem," my friend said. "I just post potentially sensitive things in my lj."
"That's a good way to do it."
"I guess. But it's also hard to decide who should read what, even in the LJ community."

last.fm
"I don't have an LJ, but what really drives me crazy is last.fm," I went on.
"Oh last.fm is the worst!"
"I know, right? I completely rely on it now to make my playlists. I use it to find out about new music, instead of talking to people or asking for mix CDs like I did in high school."
"With me," my friend said, "I just can't stop listening to a song until it scrobbles on my profile. I'm obsessed with the number of tracks I've played."

Xanga
"Hey, remember when everyone had a Xanga?" I asked.
"Yeah, haha, that was ridiculous."
"If I remember correctly, you went through several usernames."
"(Yeah, Xanga was wild.)" My friend is maybe a little embarassed by this.
"I wonder what happened to mine? I haven't logged in in years... It used to be so important to me. Did you know that that's how I became friends with Jon? I had always seen him around school in ninth grade, but it wasn't until I started commenting on his Xanga that we actually started talking in person. And now he's one of my best friends; how weird is that?"
"I feel like Xanga changed the way we made friends or met people. Before, if you wanted to get to know someone, you actually talked to them. You found out who they were. Then Xanga came along, and suddenly it was so easy to know someone without saying a word to them."
"I would argue that we don't even know people with this new method. I mean, with Facebook or any of these other websites, you know someone's favorite movies, bands, or authors, but that doesn't mean you know the person."
"Ugh, you don't know how many times I've assumed someone's going to be my best friend based on their profile, and then found out I didn't like them at all," my friend said.
"I believe it."

Twitter
"I hate Twitter," my friend said.
"What, why? You do realize the only reason I got one was because you had one, right?"
"Yeah, and the only reason I have one is because of Newsweek. All journalists feel pressured to get one, just to show that they're on top of everything. But it's so stifling; I can't be consistently witty in 140 characters or less several times a day."
"Right. And half of the things I write on there aren't very important or necessary, in retrospect. And as for seeing what you're up to, I might as well just send you a text message."

The problem
"Or an email."
"Or a Facebook message."
"Or check your scrobbles on last.fm."
"Or read your tumblr."
"Oh my God."
"I know," I said.
"This is terrible!" she said.

The experiment
"What if we just quit everything for a month?" I joked.
"Haha, nice."
"I mean, we can't though. Too much of our lives are on these sites; we need them to find out when things are happening, what our friends are doing."
"Yeah, that's true. ...But maybe that's the problem. We need them."
"What?" I said. She couldn't be serious.
"Let's do this." She was.
"Give everything up?"
"Yeah, just for a month. We would still keep our emails, and of course our phone numbers -- but I feel like anyone who really wants to reach me can do it through means other than Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, last.fm, or LiveJournal, can."
"It would certainly simplify everything."
"And I wouldn't spend hours worrying about how I look to the internet."
"It wouldn't be an issue."
"Excellent."
"Excellent."

__________________________________

So that's the plan. For the next month, my friend and I have blocked ourselves out of: Facebook, LiveJournal, tumblr, Twitter, and last.fm. We're not doing this for Lent, we're not doing it because we need to study for midterms, and we're not doing it because we're addicted. We're doing it because we constantly worry about the online versions of ourselves, and because the very nature of social online networking turns you into a sort of public figure, whether you want to be one or not.

I once said in class that I believed online social interaction was merely an extension of our real-life social interaction. I'm wondering if I should revise this statement. The energy that goes into maintaining an online representation of yourself is different than that of choosing an outfit or making small talk. Or perhaps it's the same kind of energy -- but expending more of it online than you do in the real world is, I think, not necessarily a good thing.

We'll see what happens. All I know is, the past two days have been far less stressful for me than they have been for the handful of friends who have emailed me, frantically asking, "Where did your Facebook go?"

The new, new, new Facebook

Yesterday at 3:17 pm, Mark Zuckerberg (the creator of Facebook) published a post on Facebook's official blog, objectively titled, "Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect." He discusses several (more) changes that will be made to Facebook, such as new celebrity Pages that look more like user profiles. He also includes a somewhat cryptic promise of changes to come for the Home page: "You can find out what it is your mother, your high school classmate or President Obama are doing, thinking and sharing right now just by logging into Facebook."

Now I care as much about Facebook itself as the next person (in fact, I probably care less if that person is your average college student), but I'm not as interested in this post as I am in the user response it has elicited. Facebook has changed its format dramatically since it began in 2004. There were Applications, which excited some and annoyed others (including myself) who had left the busy look of MySpace for the more minimalist design of Facebook. There was the now-infamous Newsfeed, which showed exactly what your friends were doing (as well as where and when they did it).

In true social-network fashion, these changes were not met passively. As if rebelling against some oppressive government, users self-organized into groups, circulated virtual petitions, and updated their statuses (and other immediate information) to show their disapproval. Of course, others liked various incarnations of the "new" Facebook, and they too got on discussion boards and argued it out with dissenters.

Now I may be wrong, but I don't remember a Facebook blog existing at those times. Facebook didn't provide us with an official forum for discussing these changes that so affected our Facebook-lives; therefore, Facebook itself became its own forum. (How many of you are still in groups protesting the "new" Facebook?) But with the blog, users are able to provide immediate feedback to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Some comments from yesterday's post:

"Facebook has come a long way. I like what I am seeing and looking forward to seeing how it all evolves. "

"Can Facebook go 8 months without radically changing something? Just as I get used to the new homepage, you change it again! >:("

"I HATE THE NEW HOME PAGE!!!!!"

"I love you facebook!!!!!!!"

Also interesting: a text search reveals that "twitter" (or some form of it) is used 20 times in the comments -- but not once by Mark himself.

In my opinion, the Facebook blog is necessary and useful: not only because it alerts users to changes before they happen (as opposed to surprising them one day with a Newsfeed), but also because it centralizes Facebook discussion. I didn't scroll through all 700+ comments left on the post, but from the few I did read, it looks like users are not only responding to the blog post but also to other users.

While I'm not sure how wild I'll be about the new-and-newer Facebook -- especially since it will probably change again in a few months -- I am definitely a fan of the Facebook blog. Mark Zuckerberg should sleep easy at night with the knowledge that he's done at least one thing unequivocally "right."

Your own piece of internet

I have two Twitters, three email addresses, two RSS feeds (through my two Google accounts) and two blogs. If I could get away with having more than one Facebook, I probably would. Our class has discussed these communication tools at length, and more times than not, conclude that these are great ways to reach a large number of people in a relatively small amount of time. Instead of calling a dozen friends for a movie, I can send a single email (or Facebook message). Instead of spending half an hour on the phone with each of my friends from home, I can send out short messages on Twitter.

But sometimes reaching a large number of people is a problem. I've had a Twitter for about a month now, but I recently set up a second account to stay in touch with my parents. Why? Well, the first Twitter is for a few close friends, and sometimes has updates like "I think I failed that test" or "That was a great concert" (posted at 3 am) -- both things I don't want my parents to see. The same goes for my email addresses: one is for school/professional contacts, one is for websites and acquaintances, and one is for close friends. And while the blog I'm updating right now is for my HONR229F seminar, "New Media Frontiers;" I have an entirely different one for writing about music. ...So even though I started out with one Twitter, one email address, and one blog, I've found that I have to add different versions of the same tools depending on my "audience."

The necessity of creating multiple online personas is no more clearly demonstrated than in the case of Facebook. Time and time again, we college students hear, "Be careful what you put on Facebook, employers can and will find your profile." While I don't have any innappropriate photos up, I've deleted several wall comments because a well-meaning friend hinted at something I'd rather keep private. Creating one internet profile that all the world can see solves a lot of the old problems, but also creates new ones.

Likewise, communicating through multiple Twitters, emails, and blogs can get confusing. It's a hassle to constantly sign in and out of Twitter, and when I feel like procrastinating, it's pretty tempting to rotate through my various email inboxes. And I'm not the only one; most of my good friends (you know, the ones I write to from email address #3) do the same thing.

What I find really interesting: even though all these communication tools aim to reconcile our contacts into one all-inclusive, "convenient" social network, we still naturally separate people into categories.

New nostalgia

My mom is not the most technologically-literate person. She bought an iPod, but had trouble understanding the click-and-drop concept for transferring files to it. She's owned a cell phone for about three years now, but no matter how many times I show her how to check her voicemail, she never gets my messages. So you can imagine my surprise when, this past winter break, she called me over to the computer: "Anna, come here! It's Seville!"

I looked at the screen. And she was right; the streets of Seville were there, albeit in pixelated, two-dimensional form. My mom had discovered Google Maps, and instead of searching for her office or our house, her first instinct led her to the city where she studied abroad in college. I sat down next to her as she "led" me past her old apartment, the bar where she and her friends would get drinks, the corner grocery store... I had heard my mom speak nostalgically of Seville many times, and actually seeing images of these fabled places was almost as moving for me as it was for her.

But emotions aside, I was particularly interested in my mom's use of technology. I didn't teach her how to use Google Maps, and unlike an iPod or cell phone, she wasn't using it to simplify her life. It did, however, give her a good hour or so of enjoyment and cathartic nostalgia. I would compare it to any of the number of the other means we have for reliving events in our lives: photos, souvenirs, rereading diaries or letters, calling up an old friend. Yes, Google Maps is far more interactive than a photograph; but in my opinion, both serve the same purpose. Google Maps is just my mom's new way of living an old feeling: nostalgia.

The Radio Star

I'm currently sitting at my desk, painstakingly filling out an application to intern at NPR this summer. (This is my third try; I used a funny shade of ink on the first one, and accidentally bent page three of the second one. In other words? I really really want this internship.) I was inspired to apply after I got my first show at WMUC 88.1, our college radio station. While I had always worked behind the scenes, reviewing CDs and attending meetings sporadically, it wasn't until this past winter I decided to get my own show.

Needless to say, I love it. So much so that I decided to forgo the summer-music-program-in-the-mountains route that every music major takes (and the one I have taken since I was eleven), and apply for this internship. Long hours spent recording audition tapes have been replaced by late nights sweating over the resume I just slapped together this weekend.

These internships are competitive; everyone knows who NPR is, and I'm sure legions of other similarly-qualified college sophomores are filling out their own applications at this very minute (10:55 pm).

But my question is, why radio? There are plenty of media out there that do what radio does, only better. What's the point of listening to music chosen by a stranger (or worse, a computer) when you could build your very own playlist? Why listen to deadpan news reports when Stephen Colbert can shout about the news from your TV? With so many more "advanced" choices, radio shouldn't still have the hold that it does. And yet, here I am: filling out an application for what is somehow a competitive internship.

I think this has a lot to do with the "Traditional Media Renaissance" discussion our class has going on on Blackboard. For all practical purposes, radio is dead. We can get our entertainment elsewhere, and it's generally far more realistic, interactive entertainment. TV and the internet provide us with music and news, and our array of networking systems provide us with all the person-to-person contact we need.

But this explanation is too rational. It ignores our natural tendency towards nostalgia. This past summer, I spent seven weeks at a music school in upstate New York called Meadowmount. It was unbelievably isolated -- never mind no cell phone reception or air conditioning, this place didn't have a zip code. But one of the things I missed the most was the background noise of the radio. When I was growing up, it was always on -- eating meals, getting ready for school, reading in the other room. It's almost as if radio was a real person in the room, the fourth family member. I may have not listened to everything that was said, but knowing that someone several miles away was saying it in real time was somehow comforting. I can't get that from a playlist or TV show.

Radio still exists because of its inherent value as a media, not simply because of its content. I've assigned my own romanticized role to radio, and millions of others have assigned theirs. This is why a seemingly outdated technology still exists (albeit on a smaller scale), and probably won't be replaced by newer technologies any time soon. We listen to radio because it is old-fashioned, not in spite of it.