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 Long hours spent recording audition tapes have been replaced by late nights sweating over the resume I just slapped together this weekend.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.