A BBC article gives us a glimpse. A small radio station in Brazil is strengthening its listener base by allowing it to dictate content through the station's website. "Giving the audience the power to choose the music [and] publish content related to their main interests," the owners hope to "create collaborative radio [where] audience is invited to produce everything." Audience members can chat and compile their own playlists (by suggesting and voting for songs), which are then broadcast over the airwaves and on the site.
Digging through the internet, one will stumble upon some dire predictions: radio as we know it is destined to die out or become co-opted by the its hybrid heir, the internet radio. Similar ominous forecasts loomed when TV appeared. Few are those, however, who remain assured that the medium will retain its composure without the compromises - the eventual move to the web.
That is not the question that concerns us, of course, as we are already there. What is of concern to us, however, is how to fully engage the opportunities that internet offers without losing the essence of the radio experience - the intimate tickle in your ear.
Under the guidance of All Media Consultants, Australian broadcasters embarked last year onto an experimental journey into the multimedia waters. "The world's first mobile Visual DAB/DAB+ service" was launched. It allowed "mobile phone users listening to the radio via DAB enabled handsets to view, navigate and store visual content, such as images, slides and podcasts which are broadcast in association with the radio stations."
Radio has transcended boom box and is permeating other portable devices. But the original sound is accompanied by pictures, is downloadable anywhere (and while blogger's spellchecker may not recognize podcast yet, it has no qualms with downloadable) and is consumed outside of the home, in transit - perhaps the most radical of all the changes. Can then the intimacy of fireside chats be preserved in the commotion of the morning's commute?
It is perhaps this that worried most Steeve Keeney when he attributed radio's survival to its ability to "reinvent itself [and become] more local." The impersonalization of the internet - and its omnipresence - puts that localness in jeopardy.
Yet the exhilaration of internet as a soundboard of sorts outweighs the apprehension that may come with it. The experimentation - mixing sounds, images and text - is aimed to make for a tasty and easily digestible media medley.
"Easily digestible" may be the key phrase. Richard Mayer's modality-principle studies conclude that information absorption is facilitated when presented through use of multiple modalities (verbal and visual, for example). The split-attention effect, however, favors narration and cautions against relying on text to accompany visuals. "On-screen text and animation" writes Meyer, "can overload the visual information processing system whereas narration is processed in the verbal information processing system and animation is processed in the visual information processing system."
Would the same conclusion apply when considering text and narration? One would assume that since the two do not compete for the same processing channel - one is visual, the other aural after all - the conflict would be minimal. In his article on interaction between spoken and written information, Nader T. Tavassoli writes that whereas it was previously assumed that all verbal information (regardless modality of transference (the author considers speech and text a modality, rather than medium)) is processed on a single channel it is "now believed that spoken and written language are at least partially processed in modality-specific mental channels." (Tavassoli, 26) In consecutive presentation, the integration of information is greater within these modalities than it is across them (people retain more if presented with only text or only narration; alternating formats leads to greater interference). When redundant verbal information is presented bi-modally (a good example is the previous attempt at The End of the Dial: We Continue to Tweak, Part 1 where author's narration is "buttressed" by text that is repeated on the screen) the author argues in favor of such reinforcement - ultimately, the combination of the two will lead to greater retention of information.
But how about introducing new textual information while listening to audio?
The following example offers an interesting case study.
Scott Bateman animation consists of competing rather than complimentary forms of verbal and visual modalities. In this case, the text is the central component of the presentation. It is coupled with simple animation. If we were to agree with Mayer's suggestion, the combination of the two is cognitively overwhelming as both vie for the same processing channel. In addition to double visual stimuli, the basis for the Bateman cartoon is its audio - in this case, the presidential debates. Even if Bateman assumes the common knowledge of his viewers (more than likely, all of us have seen the debates), his text refers to the soundbites and is often not independent of them. Rather, the text is a direct reaction to the previous clip, therefore requiring of the viewer to be aware of what was previously said in order to comprehend the visual information (text) as he or she processes it. In my case, this often requires a second viewing.
The conflict in Bateman cartoons is between the text and the audio: the animation (simple and repetitive) is on the sidelines of the discourse.
This is the challenge for the radio as it tries to potentially incorporate some, if not all, of these "gadgets". The conflict is lesser, for example, when photographs are involved. Interspersed throughout the audio piece, photographs could provide a pleasant surprise and an additional lure for the listener (the anticipation - already present in the piece - of what comes next, both visually and aurally).
As these things are debated, an important thing to consider is the audience participation, something of which McLuhan divested the radio. The example of the Brazilian station shows the necessity of the new directions that will perhaps further challenge his arbitrary definitions.
