Monday, September 12, 2011

Will radio collapse after constant tremors?

After reading the three chapters of Journalism 3.0, I'm wondering whether radio "building" will collapse in the next tremor happening to media city. The answer of mine is "no". Actually I could hardly figure out any media that will collapse (I mean the basic content form here, not "physical appearance" which may be reflected by device). The key point lies in how those "buildings" are repaired and reinforced after each tremor. With the constant reinforcement, the building appearance may look extremely different compared with the initial one. However, the core function of those buildings will still stand there and perhaps even more valued by audiences.

As for radio, it seems to be the only media form that dominates people’s hearing. That’s the fundamental reason why radio building won’t collapse. It’s not so hard the guess what radio will be like the in near future. Digitalization and combination with Internet would be the inevitable trend. As for the physical device for personal user, it would be cell phone for a generally long time. The other device innovations, like iPad, won’t have large impact on radio, since it’s still too large to be a listening tool.

I think radio will stay in “one to all” communication model. After all, things will be quite messy if all comments or feedbacks in audio form happen at the same time. With the digitalization and widely spread on Internet, more people could and would start their own “radio station” and achieve their contents in an audio-blog. It may derive to be a new interaction method among people.

A few problems may arise from the popularity of various radio contents which includes public service, commercial, and personal owned. One could be the information redundancy, which also happens to Internet. The more specified and larger source of info could be good, but that also leads to unnecessary confusion and difficulty to search really useful information. Besides, the technology of information identification hasn’t made an effective breakthrough in searching certain things in audio files without written text or keywords. That could contribute to the insufficient use of audio information as well.

There does exist competition among various media forms (TV, radio, social media, printing media, etc.) in terms of Ad revenue (public service is excluded from Ad revenue consideration here), number of audience, and so on. On the other hand, there is a large possibility for those media forms to cooperate with each other to earn larger benefits. Public profile of traditional mass media company on social media is an example. “For consumers, media is a package deal”, perhaps the future trend is that it’s producers that package the various contents instead of consumers themselves.

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