Radio's new wave

We've taken it for granted for years, that always-available stream of music and talk housed in the plastic box on the kitchen counter or behind the dashboard. It woke us in the morning, relieved the tedium on our commute, provided the background to our day, and often our lullaby at night. Radio has been both pervasive and invisible, both local and distant, both intimately familiar and beguilingly exotic. But it is changing. Radio today represents a distinctly different medium from just five years ago, and greater transformations are just around the corner.

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What was radio? In the United States, it was always primarily a local phenomenon emanating from that local station downtown or out on the beltway. The way American radio frequencies are assigned you could be sure that almost any radio station you could pick up on your receiver came from within a short drive.

Somewhere inside the typically unprepossessing squat building was a studio with a real live person in it, a DJ or a talk show host. Whether through the medium of music or of talk, the local radio station was filtering the unfamiliar and far-away through the medium of the familiar and local. Radio was a mechanism for importing national and international news, music, information, advertising, and opinions right into our homes and cars, but always from a local source.

Radio still does this, but starting in the '90s with the increasing consolidation of ownership and digitization of operations, more and more local-seeming radio in fact came from some distant corporate location. Thanks to satellite transmission, entire broadcast days were prerecorded and sent wholesale to stations and affiliates around the nation. Down the street at the local station, the loudest noise was the whirring of computers as they plugged in local IDs, ads, and weather. ''Local" call-in contests were faked, pre-recorded far away. In many cities and towns, stations were transformed into carefully formatted outlets of the same two or three big companies. A drive across the country brought in not the staticky succession of widely divergent, colorful local accents and tastes, but the same hit list of songs and raucous DJ patter, wherever you went.

It seemed like this would be the future of radio: large, corporate, national, and homogenized. No more room for the little guy. But ironically, some of the very things that produced this widespread standardization may now be enabling a swing in precisely the opposite direction. In a homogenized world, local culture becomes more valuable. The FCC recognized this trend by authorizing, after much controversy, hundreds of small, low-power FM stations around the country, squeezed in between the current assignments. The community radio movement is strong, and new stations are coming on the air regularly. Public radio is attracting bigger audiences than ever. One strong impetus behind these local efforts is the increasing diversity of national and international programs they can draw on, doing what radio has always done best: filtering the distant through familiar and specific local interests, tastes, and habits. Media scholars call this ''glocalism," and it works. Radio is both more global and more local than it was before.

Three new possibilities show how radio-after-radio might work.

Web radio: global radio from the bottom up. As broadcasting, cable, satellite, and high-speed Internet services combine (not to mention telephone), we will soon be able to tune in to radio on the Web as easily as we do over the air radio now. There are thousands of radio stations and stand-alone webcasters out there now, all coming from specific locations but heard around the world.

You don't need a license to run a Web radio service; anyone with the desire and the technical know-how can simply set up and operate. BigFatRadio from Sydney, Freies Radio Wien in Vienna, Kiwi Radio from New Zealand, Kimoji Net from Taipei, Radio Morena from Brazil, or even Radio Free Kansas redefine what it means to be ''from" somewhere, available anywhere. On the Internet, many formerly illegal ''pirate" stations have finally found a home, as well. This is global local radio: not generic formulas spread thinly like margarine over lucrative demographics, but local culture reaching out in all its depth and difference to a global audience.

Satellite services like Sirius and XM might seem like the ultimate in nonrooted radio, but what they have done is to take the concept further. Satellite radio removes the middleman and puts national and international radio right into the hands of individual subscribers. Echoing the Army ad, we now have a ''radio of one." What we lose in community recognition we gain in personalized listening. And what we get is a variety of content that goes after those elements of aural culture that didn't work for traditional radio in either its corporate or local manifestations: content too quirky and marginal for mass distribution over the airwaves, and too challenging and outrageous for many local communities.

By virtue of its distribution system, satellite radio falls outside both radio regulation and radio's traditional economics. It also imports a high proportion of international content, including Spanish language services and news and talk from around the world, along with ''lost" genres like radio drama, and music presented in much deeper and broader categories than commercial radio's demographics could ever dream of. However, satellite radio maintains radio's essential ''live" quality, sending out material in a steady stream, even though most of it comes from recorded sources. Listeners can move between car, home, and walkabout without interruption, connected to a continuous stream of ''as if live" sound. It feels like radio

Podcasting, however, goes the next step by shifting aural culture not only over space but over time as well. This new but rapidly developing technique shows how radio after radio can move between the glocalism of Web radio and the personalized streaming of satellite services. Thanks to a program written especially to serve the new generation of individual digital audio recorders, podcasting allows individuals anywhere in the world to load audio files onto sites like ipodder.org, which can then be selected for regular uploading by listeners with portable music recording devices.

Podcasts can be just about anything -- personalized selections of music, commentary, and discussion, live dialogues and dramas, information about almost any topic -- but the key thing is that its production, as well as reception, is completely unfiltered by larger corporate or institutional gatekeepers. This is radio by the people, for the people, and it can be listened to by those people in their own sweet time. No need to worry about missing that 4 p.m. broadcast; it's all there waiting for you when you're ready.

And in a final twist, podcasting is moving back onto both local radio and satellite radio waves. Several US radio stations, and more around the world, have begun incorporating podcasts into their over-the-air shows, including WFMU in New York. KYCY in San Francisco has announced plans to go to a totally podcast format; twisting again, programs will also be available on its Web radio service, kyouradio.com. Most recently, MTV personality Adam Curry announced that he will host an all-podcast show over Sirius Satellite starting this month.

Radio thus becomes a gatekeeper again for individual producers, creating culture out of their local environments, combining bits and pieces of music and information drawn from all over the world, now finding a wider audience not in their geographical communities but in the global associations that the content itself builds for them. This model is at once much more like early radio, the one created by amateurs and small businesses in the 1920s, and completely different in its time-, space-, and community-shifting qualities. But it is radio, after radio, and stronger than ever.

Michele Hilmes is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and director of the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research.