Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Technology, she marches

The first time that I heard the original radio series of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (which is, of course, The One True Version) it was 1981 and I was listening to the repeats at the age of 7. As it was originally broadcast in 1978, I'd have been about 5 at the time of first transmission and not even the most precocious 5-year-old would have really grokked it.

But I digress. The first time I heard the series, I was sitting in a flat in Hannover with my family listening to the series on Radio 4's fading, crackling long-wave service which just about reached Hannover in daylight with a following wind. If they'd repeated it after dark reception would probably have been somewhat better (insert tedious explanation of sky-wave propagation, ionisation and skip zones here), but as it was it was crackly and mushy.

Almost 25 years later, I'm listening to episode 2 of the new series in studio-quality audio on Radio 4 via DAB. My digital terrestrial TV box is automatically recording the programme for me so I can listen to it again. "But Ah!", I hear you say. "You're in the UK now rather than in Germany, and there would have been FM stereo in the UK in 1981 too, so it's not a fair comparison!".

You could say that, sure, but there's more. If I was in Germany now, I'd most likely have an Internet connection available, so getting the programme in hi-fi stereo (or even, experimentally, as 5.1 surround) would just be a case of streaming it from the BBC's web page. Only if I was somewhere without an Internet connection would it be necessary to mess about with AM radio receivers and propagation theory, and there are now very few places in the developed world where you can't get an Internet connection of some form.

What I'm getting at here in a rather ham-fisted way is that the speed with which digital media have come to pervade every aspect of broadcasting has been absolutely astonishing. Ten years ago I would have been playing with long wire antennas and Sony short wave receivers with synchronous detectors, as well as simply crossing my fingers in the hope that the ionosphere would be co-operative, in order to pull in radio stations from foreign countries with mushy, fading audio. Nowadays, if I want to listen to Radio Japan I don't have to look up schedules and band plans and wait up until god knows when so the conditions are favourable. I can just call up a stream and there it is. Want to hear Radio Australia's Tok Pisin service, usually only broadcast to the southwest Pacific? There's a stream for that too.

One of the very first things I ever did when I got an account on a machine with Internet mail access was to construct a message which would come straight back to me in Nottingham via mcsun in the Netherlands, kddlabs in Japan, munnari in Australia, and back to Nottingham. It took a couple of minutes to circumnavigate the globe (this was back in the days when every mail machine was an open relay - the net was a kinder, gentler place then) but when it got back it seemed like magic. That was just over a decade ago, but today people everywhere, not just researchers on academic networks, hardly blink at the knowledge that they're sending a mail message halfway round the world. People have got so used to the digital revolution so fast that they only notice if their mail message takes longer than a few seconds to arrive, whereupon they complain to their system administrator.

But with this wide-ranging and ubiquitous stream of bits covering just about every corner of the developed world, it's easy to forget that there are large parts of the world which don't have easy, cheap or fast Internet access. The digital divide is something that's real, something that's widely ignored, and one of the hot topics which need to be addressed in the 21st Century. While people in Britain are starting to casually talk about switching off the existing analogue television and radio broadcast networks, there are large chunks of the world which aren't likely to have DAB, or ADSL, or any affordable Internet access at all for a long time yet. There are still plenty of places which rely entirely on HF radio for their communications with the outside world.

The old-fashioned analogue technology may be cheerfully derided as "steam radio" by those fortunate enough to live in a digital world, but for billions of people it's still a lifeline as there's a vast installed base, receivers are ubiquitous and cheap to run (there's a reason the Freeplay radio won so many awards when it came out - plenty of people don't have mains electricity and can't afford to buy batteries), and most third world broadcasters find it hard enough to pay the bills, let alone fund expensive digital broadcasting experiments. Analogue radio will retain its position as the most democratic and accessible medium out there for some time yet, and it's important that planners and bureaucrats as well as the population in general remember this when they're next thinking of cutting the BBC World Service's budget or reducing their shortwave broadcasting hours to pay for expensive digital broadcasts for the wealthy few.

Incidentally, if you feel like spreading a little democracy then for a few quid (or dollars, or euros) you can donate a wind-up radio to places where they really need them, courtesy of the Freeplay Foundation.

Posted by mpk at September 28, 2004 9:10 PM | TrackBack