this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
1005 points (90.6% liked)
Technology
58157 readers
4171 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why? Have you heard radio? Every station is just a glorified shitty playlist that they cycle through a dozen times a day
Because if the cell networks fail, right now there's no backup method to get crucial information to everyone's hands.
Radio are an easy secondary, really long range mechanism to get information INTO disaster stricken areas when normal means of communications have failed.
Back home we had a local station, felt like a way of tuning into "the city." Very few breaks outside of their pledge drives once/twice a year. Listening to the Jazz station here on short drives these days. Very few ads, and some pretty gnarly shit. College radio stations are also pretty easy to find and escape that ad insanity.
Don't let radio and broadcast TV die quite yet, it's still very viable, especially as we sort out net neutrality and failsafe systems in cases of emergency.
That's what happens when we "removed regulations" and allowed Clear Channel (aka iHeartRadio) to buy up most every major station in the country.
However you can still do short range FM transmissions yourself, as a lot of people do with elaborate Christmas light displays, plus it's useful in emergency situations.
Which country?
Probably the US, since they just assume everyone would know they're talking about the US.
And crazy levels of advertising to boot.
Emergencies that would normally sever other means of communications. Think natural disasters that interrupt internet access. Usually radio stations are the first to come back up, and priceless at times where information is key.
In Atlanta we have a pretty nice jazz station (WCLK). The station that NPR took over (Album 88) was a university station and they still play stuff in the evening I think. There can be good content but it is heavily reliant on where you live. Come to think of it, WCLK is a university station as well. So I guess you have to have universities around.