Explaining an abstract concept can be quite a difficult task. Indeed, it’s so hard to define a word such as “love” —just to give an example—that there’re as many definitions of what “to love” is as people in the world. I have a similar difficulty when I try to explain what listening to the radio really means. Sure enough, for those who don’t usually listen to the radio because they prefer the more “entertaining” television, the definition could be as simple and shallow as “a square-shaped device with loudspeakers that transmits several programmes in aural format” or “a studio from where such programmes are broadcasted”. However, these definitions fail to reflect the sentimental value that all radio listeners actually attach to a radio.
That is to say: listening to the radio involves emotions. For example, if a feeling of loneliness begins to pervade your mind, just tune in any radio station and, believe it or not, you’ll begin to feel accompanied. This happens because there’s a voice in there who is speaking directly to you. There’re no mediators between that voice and you. To tell the truth, I have to confess that it was in part due to this feeling of loneliness that I became a radio listener.
It al happened almost eleven years ago. After I had split up with my first girlfriend, I was feeling rather blue one freezing winter Saturday night in which an incessant downpour and strong gusts of wind seemed to echo my depressed mood. It was three o’clock in the morning and there I was, alone, in my bedroom, playing with my cell phone, when I realized that the phone had an integrated FM radio tuner. Bored as I was, I decided to give it a try. The first programme that I listened to was a radio phone-in where, much to my surprise, dozens of listeners went on air to express the same grief that I was experiencing at the same time. It was that day that I became a listener.
Being able to share something (a radio programme) with someone (every single radio listener) is, I believe, one of the most powerful features of listening to the radio. There’s a sense of belonging which the radio’s younger cousin, the television, will never be able to achieve. As the television tends to be more impersonal and distant, it doesn't create the same sense of unity that the radio does create. This sense of unity arises because, as I've mentioned before, when you listen, you feel that the radio presenter and even the callers are taking you as their direct interlocutors. They allow you to form part of a conversation. They don’t discriminate: everyone’s invited to listen and, if someone has lost interest, just by tuning in a different station the problem is solved.
And we shouldn’t forget that radio programmes don’t only promote a sense of community, as it also stimulates our imagination. Unlike television, where sounds and images are mixed up, something that leads us to become passive recipients, the radio involves a process of active translation: translation of sounds into images. Thus, for almost every single sound that comes out of the loudspeaker we are invited to visualize what we are listening to.
I have come a long way from those simple definitions of the radio that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Explaining the sentimental value that people like me attach to a “square-shaped object” has been as difficult as trying to explain my own definition of love. Maybe I should have simplified things saying: “I love listening to the radio”. That might have been enough to explain what I feel.