新編大學(xué)英語(yǔ)第四冊(cè)u(píng)nit8 Text A: It's Radio!

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UNIT 8 IN-CLASS READING; New College English (IV)

It's Radio!

The medium that can turn anywhere into somewhere

1 The truth is that radio has not been eclipsed by television and cable and the Internet. In fact, radio is as popular as it has ever been. According to the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, 675 million radio receivers are currently in use in the United States; on average, Americans over the age of eleven spend three hours and eighteen minutes of every weekday listening to at least one of them.

2 I don't mention this to make the case that radio is "better" than other electronic media (I use and enjoy all of them), but I will say that it is different, very different. Radio is special to people. And in an era when we have so many other media available to us, radio still inspires a kind of loyalty that premium channels and Web sites cannot claim.

3 This loyalty is largely due to radio's very limitations. Radio can't dazzle us with visual spectacles; it has to capture and hold our attention aurally. That is, it has to speak to us, through either words or music. Combine this with the fact that radio is a curiously intimate medium: people tend to feel that they are connecting with their radios one-on-one. This is generally not the case with television, where the individual viewer invariably senses that he or she is nothing more than an anonymous, statistically insignificant part of a huge and diverse audience. But because radio is a "smaller" medium, the individual listener can somehow believe that the signal is traveling directly and uninterruptedly from the studio microphone to his set alone, that the announcer is speaking and playing records just for him. Few people exploited this quality as well as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His radio "Fireside Chats" endeared him to countless listeners, who reported feeling during his broadcasts as if the President were sitting in their living room and talking with them like a next-door neighbor. Roosevelt was given credit for his ability to use the new medium so effectively, but a case can be made that it was actually the nature of the new medium, its peculiar power and personality that made Roosevelt so effective on it.

4 Intimacy is itself both cause and effect of another singular truth about radio: most people, most of the time, listen to their radios in solitude. Radio, then, is usually more than just a medium; it is company. Whether it is the company of first choice or of last resort makes no difference. It is a reliable and tireless buffer between solitude and loneliness, and for this it is often regarded, consciously or otherwise, as an old and valued friend.

5 I had no real use for radio until after I graduated from college. I was born in New York City in the late 1960s, and grew up in its dense suburbs toward the end of the transition from black-and-white to color television. In junior high school twenty-channel cable TV came along; in high school we got "microcomputers", which boasted two whole kilobytes of random-access memory for information storage. In retrospect, of course, these innovations look hopelessly crude, but at the time they were more than enough to render radio seemingly irrelevant to my life.

6 Then I found myself working as a reporter at a daily newspaper in the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is a place that can blind you, if not drive you mad, with its sameness and isolation. It is endlessly flat and completely rural. My job often required me to drive great distances, usually on long, straight two-lane roads with vast plantation fields on both sides. It was not at all unusual for me to travel many miles without seeing another car, a house, or even a road sign. In such an atmosphere it is not difficult to imagine that one is the last person on the planet. Not difficult, and not pleasant, either.

7 On one such journey I turned off the tape deck in my car and started listening to the radio. I can't say exactly what day that happened, or why, but I can say, with confidence, that the first day I listened to the radio while driving through the Delta was also the last day I used the tape deck. The radio was the perfect cure for the paralyzing remoteness of the Delta. It didn't matter anymore that I couldn't detect any evidence of humankind on a lonely stretch of Highway 49; I could always turn on the radio and hear a human voice. I began to realize that radio could do more even than preserve my sanity and defeat my homesickness; it could provide me with a wealth of information on, and a hearty appreciation for, a place as different from my home town as any in the country.

8 It was also in Mississippi that I discovered what might be my favorite thing about radio its durability. Sometimes on clear nights I would get in my car and drive out of town, out along the narrow highways of the Delta, where we my car and I would be surrounded by a darkness so intense that it seemed tangible. Often I drove without any particular destination in mind. My real objective on these trips was simply to drive my car along the small roads while sliding back and forth along the AM dial to see what distant, exotic stations I could pull in'. I don't believe in magic, but I do know that sitting in my car in the middle of Mississippi and listening to a signal that traveled more than a thousand miles, over nearly a dozen states, and came down into my car through an antenna and two speakers, was as near to a magical experience as ever I'm likely to have.

9 A year later, when I was a graduate student in Alabama, I decided to seek employment at the school's FM radio station to make some extra money. I ended up hosting my own show, playing jazz from ten at night until two in the morning several nights a week. We had a toll-free number, so people weren't shy about calling, and many did, from dozens of small towns I'd never heard of and couldn't even find on the station's gigantic wall map. They called for any number of reasons to request a song or an artist and to tease me for mispronouncing the name of their county. Most times, I think, they called for no reason at all except to make contact with someone who had made contact with them to express, without saying it openly, their appreciation. I worked at the station alone, and I was as thankful for the contact as they. It is a powerful feeling to send your voice out into the night over thousands of square miles, and it is powerfully satisfying to know that your voice is being heard, by real people sitting in real living rooms in real houses.

10 Like the telephone, radio enables human voices to be heard on a one-to-one basis over vast distances, and in the final analysis, it is the intimacy and the friendliness of radio that I appreciate the most.