Signal Strength Presentation

788 views, 1 favs, 5 embeds more stats

Signal Strength

When thinking about what to say more

Signal Strength

When thinking about what to say today I often got sidetracked into thinking about how to fix the problem radio faces. The predicament radio has gotten into. The tragic, pathetic and seemingly terminal prognosis. I had dinner last night, purely coincidentally, with Jeff Jarvis - the author of What Would Google Do and reformed old-school media stalwart. I told him about talking to you all today - he grimaced and said, “Those guys are dead.” I suggested that maybe the newspaper guys were deader and maybe radio has already reinvented itself in various forms. Maybe. But those guys tomorrow, those guys are dead.

I love radio. I have always loved radio. It’s a soundtrack. It’s a heart beat. It is more a part of real life than maybe any other signal written, visual or interactive. It has the best pictures. I love radio. So I naturally want to fix radio. When I was at the University of Minnesota, I spent time at KUOM. I felt more connected and maybe more creative than in any other job I’ve done since. It had a huge and lasting impact on me. It shaped me.

I remember as a kid growing up in the 70’s in the middle of a corn field in Iowa feeling radio was the one thing that reliably connected me to the broader world. Locally as in the world ‘in town’ but also the world beyond. Listening during the long summer breaks to KWAY and the daily “Swap and Shop” and lives coming together, lives falling apart. Revealed to me in the items that people needed or needed to get rid of. The stories of lives beginning and lives ending and unexpected twists and detours in otherwise normal, boring lives were told in elaborate and veiled detail from eleven to one every day.

Later, as a car-less young teenager, I got around on tractors and bicycles and dirt
bikes up and down gravel roads and through the fields of corn and corn and soybeans listening to radios, discovering popular music, music that was not my parents’ and feeling connected to that agitated, rebellious, horny angst of 38 Special, and Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers and Steve Miller. Then feeling so desperate to be part of it and for it to be part of what I was trying to be. I called the KFMW request line - long distance. A human answered the phone. Older. Male. Deep and busy sounding. I stepped up and said could you play ‘Refugee’ for Christie. What song you want played? Uh, Refugee by Tom Petty and the – . Refugee. Alright I’ll get it right on kid. Click. And my chest felt full of hot blood and breath and my face was hot red and I got on my ten speed and pedaled hard up the road with a radio hanging over the ram horn handle bar of my bike. I prayed I could get to Christie before the DJ played the song. I wanted to see her face. Take credit. Get laid. But Christie wasn’t home. I hung out under the tree across from her driveway, heart beating frantically, hoping that the song wouldn’t come on. Then her mom’s car crawled up the road and slowed as it passed me and pulled into the driveway. I played it cool as her mom squinted over the wheel at me, the radio playing as it hung from my handle bars. I practiced in my mind how I would tell her that I requested the song for her. Her favorite. That I thought I was falling in love with her. And we’d kiss. That afternoon we talked for hours and hours feeling half drunk from the smell of sun and pool water and sweat and faint cigarette smoke that only a fifteen year old girl can twirl together into the sweetest perfume a fifteen year old boy would ever smell. Then as the fireflies came out and the sun got low she had to go in for dinner. I rode home slow. And the song came on. And that heavy, hot blood and breath came back into my chest. And then I was a teenager. A teenager as free and angry and in deep and desperate as any had ever been and protected only by a transistor FM radio.

Signal strength. In telecommunications, particularly in radio, signal strength refers to the magnitude of the electric field at a reference point that is a significant distance from the transmitting antenna. It may also be referred to as received signal level or field strength. Typically, it is expressed in voltage per length or signal power received by a reference antenna. Of course there are other ways to measure signal strength.

Another definition of signal strength. The degree of disambiguity of messages between two parties as measured by the availability or ubiquity of a chosen medium or toolset. Phones have high signal strength. In the eighties if you worked on a PC you could not interact with a Mac. Today, most documents are interchangeable, you can even run Windows on a Mac - good signal strength. Also, the flexibility of use of the medium or toolset by the end user measured by the number of real world use-cases. Today mobile phones can be used for many things other than voice calls. And extensibility as measured by the ability of a medium or toolset to be successfully be adapted to uses unforeseen by the original specification. Consider the internet and specifically Twitter as a proof point. Earlier this week a bank employee tweeted the immediate aftermath of a bank robbery. Or Youtube, last week a former customer of United Airlines wrote a song and shot a music video instead of mailing a letter to the complaints department. The internet has awesome signal strength.

Radio owes its development to two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone, all three technologies are closely related. Radio technology began as "wireless telegraphy" Marconi sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in 1895. By 1899 he flashed the first wireless signal across the English Channel. Two years later in 1902 the letter "S" was telegraphed from England to Newfoundland. November 2, 1920, KDKA-Pittsburgh broadcast the Harding-Cox election returns and began a daily schedule of radio programs. By 1926 RCA was the Google of its day. It was in acquisition, and innovation mode buying up companies and filing patents hand over fist. RCA gave away radios and advertisers were happy to pay. It was what Chris Anderson of Wired and author of the Long Tail and Free calls the freemium model. It was innovation. Signal Strength went through the roof. Radio had a very bright future.

By 1994 there were a trickle of patents being filed. Acquisitions were about accounting. And innovation came in the form of sales classes with titles like “How to sell against the Yellow pages.”

What happened?

Radio stopped measure signal strength as measured with the user and paid attention almost exclusively to signal strength measures by investors or potential investors. Profit and protection.

So what was abandoned? What was abandoned were principles still very much in use today in other areas.

Users
Problems
Try

What will happen to radio? It will survive. It will be remade. It will redefine how it measures signal strength. It will. It is the long tail of broadcasting or media. But my kids or grandkids may be breathlessly listening not to KFMW but to the next great innovation in radio. I don’t know what that is. Knowing what it is isn’t really the point. Believing that it exists and believing that you can get there, that you can build it. That’s the point.

Thanks.

less