MENDUNI- Innovative radio; from Quick time to Podcasting and the flaneur

Four steps in innovative radio broadcasting: From QuickTime to podcasting
Enrico Menduni Universita Roma Tre, Italy
The Radio Journal - International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, Volume 5 Number 1.2007
doi: 10.1386/rajo.5.1.9/1

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Abstract

Is podcasting the future of radio? 

Is podcasting that missing link connecting radio and the Net that Internet radio stations were not able to establish? 

Is podcasting a revolutionary or a transitory cultural trend? 

Furthermore, is podcasting a way towards a more democratic audio media system or is it rather a new tool in the hands of the multinational recording industry? 

This article will explore these questions, providing an historical framework to the introduction of digital sound (from 1991 to 2007) and related social practices, distinguishing four main phases: 

• the birth of the popular use of digital music; 
• Web radio; 
• Music for free; 
• the iPod and podcasting.

Critical analysis is supported by several examples, all taken from the Italian radio landscape. While the extension of these results to other countries, even in the age of globalisation, may need to proceed with caution, comparative studies are eagerly anticipated.

NOTES (ed. GGA)

All these hints, however provisional, suggest a role for podcasting as a niche prosumer activity, not as random listening or a passive feed from the podcaster. 

While Internet radio is highly static, rooted in the household, podcasting could be the true heir of the urban explorations of the Walkman, both having as their ancestor the flaneur (city-walker) of Baudelaire: the person who ‘marries the crowd’, who likes most ‘to be out of home, and nevertheless to feel at home everywhere, to watch the world, to be in its centre and to be in hiding’ (Baudelaire 1885: 64–65).

Indeed, even more than the Walkman, podcasting implies a component of manual manipulation on the computer keyboard, accessible to a niche of passionate lovers of music and radio. It seems to indicate the future of radio but, nevertheless, it is difficult to think of mass podcasting given that it requires a component of specialised computer work.

What is evoked here, curiously, is radio’s past rather than its future, recalling its amateur phase: i.e., those wireless (sanfilistes) radio-amateurs of the 1910s and 1920s, who built
their own radio sets prior to mass production. 

 

This suggests that podcasting is a mid-term technology, representing one of a number of possible ways for radio to face a complex digital future. 

As an interesting and effective social technology, podcasting would appear to retain the mobile and interactive aspects of radio, its valued attributes as a medium. 

Yet podcasting may still not offer the definitive mode of radio consumption. 

Another mobile device of modern times, the cellular phone, seems to be more established and more popular. 

It may well be that the mobile phone will create its own political economy as a technological and social platform to carry other media, like a radio set or a camera, a recorder or an MP3 player, and a popular billing system. Indeed it may be that radio in the digital era may profit more by establishing some form of alliance with mobile phones, including an evolution of podcasting, as suggested by the presentation in December 2006 by Apple of an iPhone. 

Technology in the UMTS generation of mobile phones could be ready for this but, once again,
it will be the social uses of technology rather than the technology itself that will finally decide.