Radio

This is me :)
(and my dog, Jackson)

Hi!  My name is Jessica--I am a 24 year-old junior at the University of Louisville where I am majoring in Communications.  As someone who is constantly seeking the newest forms of technology, I am hopeful that this class will educate me on the devices I use on a daily basis.  It is my hope that this blog will provide you with my insight into communication technology.

After receiving my first computer as a gift from my parents in the 7th grade, I was tasked with figuring out how to set it up on my own.  A few hours and a few tears of frustration later--I had figured it out!  Like most computers of the time, mine too came with the AOL free trial.  Nothing excited me more than hearing "you've got mail!" --it made me feel superior; I was receiving e-mail while my friends were lucky to get snail mail.  A year later I became the most popular kid in the 8th grade when I got a CD burner. Granted, it took me days to download an entire CD's worth of music on Napster, but what a small price to pay for popularity!

Not much has changed since then (well, minus being the most popular kid in school); I still seek out the newest technologies and am not ashamed to admit that I stood in line for several hours waiting to get my new iPhone 4S.  Technology fascinates me.  It allows me to keep in touch with people I would likely lose track of, it entertains me, it pays my bills (my husband is a technology consultant), and it just makes my life easier.  Technology may not be all rainbows and lollipops, but for me the good outweighs the bad.

Radio

As a small child I used to believe that the music from the radio was actually coming from a tiny band that lived in the air vents of the car.  I think I got the idea from Shining Time Station, a tv show I watched where puppets lived inside a juke box and would play the music after they collected the nickels.  I actually remember the day I told this story to my mom and she told me the truth--that the music was coming from the radio and we were hearing it through the speakers.  I was truly sad--I was going to miss the people playing music for me in the air vents.

Growing up, if we were in the car the radio was on.  My mom was a big fan of classic rock while my dad preferred country. And when I spent the summers in the deep south with my grandma I got to listen to gospel music (all. the. time.).  The car wasn't the only time we listened to the radio though.  We would listen as we cleaned the house, it would come on as a sign to wake up in the mornings and although I was limited to the amount of TV I could watch, I had unlimited access to the radio.

Seriously...our town was really boring.
We spent A LOT of time in the car. 

As I got older and was able to drive myself I began listening to the morning show on my way to school--sometimes I would sit in the car until minutes before the bell rang so I could catch the last of the Bob & Sherry show.  As soon as I was back in my car at the end of the day, the radio was back on and if a song I really liked was playing as I neared home I'd drive around the block until it finished.  In a town as small as mine, driving around listening (and by listening I mean singing at the top of your lungs) to the radio with your friends was sometimes our only form of entertainment.

                                                                   

While I still listen to the radio today, it's not in a traditional sense.  I still enjoy listening to the morning show (Bob & Sherry have been replaced by Lambert & Lindsay), but the majority of my radio listening is online.  Once Pandora hit the internet, I was hooked.  I didn't have to listen to a commercial after every song, I could skip songs I didn't like and I could create stations that were tailored for me.

If I were to predict the future of radio I would predict that it will continue to evolve.  More options like pandora and spotify will emerge and the radio we're used to will have to be revamped to keep up.  While I don't see traditional radio ever being completely phased out, I believe the way we listen to radio twenty years from now will be very different from the way we listen today.  I believe the radio we listen to in our cars will be almost exclusively satellite radio and that rather than listening to the radio at home we'll be streaming everything from the internet (pandora, spotify, rhapsody, ect.).  Though it is always said about new technology, Radio really did change the way we communicate with each other and it is my hope that it will continue to find ways to evolve.