On this web page there is some data about how much of different media people are consuming. (It's not the main point of the (pretty interesting) article, but just look under the heading "Consumption of Information".)

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html#consumption



It occurred to me that, moving into the future, the amount of radio people listen to must be fairly consistent, not given to drastic changes, since the time that people spend commuting, or simply driving around, certainly is not going down any time soon. So in the foreseeable future, the audio market, at least as it's directed to people who are mobile, should be quite safe from the ravages of our visual culture.

The research numbers sort of give the lie to what I said, but just a little bit. People are listening to AUDIO about the same amount. But they're listening to recorded audio more, and live radio less. Radio consumption went down by something like 8% over the period of 1992-2000 (comparable to the shrinkage of newspapers). But recorded music consumption was up by 15%. So as an overall, the amount of time people spend getting plain old waves in the ear is fairly constant over that period.

(And that chunk of media-interface-time is 15-20 times bigger than the count of Internet-eyeball-hours.)

Right now, all the techie excitement in audio is around personal devices like the Rio, the iPod, etc -- solitary little devices that make your home library available to you. Which is great as far as it goes. Storage will be cheaper; someone will figure out how to do DRM; then you'll have a gajillion songs in your pocket. In a couple of hops of Moore's Law, we'll have every song we ever heard in our pocket (or every song we can afford). But that's got to stop being interesting sometime. These are cool devices, and they're personal, but there's a difference between being personal and being social. These are not social devices. People want to hear what other people are up to; being alone in a huge library is solipsistic, chaotic, impersonal. So I think there's an interesting angle there for the evolution of people on the radio; radio will have to compete with a Borges library.

Or, perhaps more likely, these devices won't attract a truly general public _until_ they have some strong social valence. (Computers needed email and chat to get them over a certain demographic hump. Just so . . . )

The research project I'm working on right now is an attempt to suggest a revamped notion of (at least talk) radio.