Quote from TM_Direct:
in reality, who would have thought that with the advent of TV and internet in the 1990's that radio would become such an important outlet? Radio is tougher then tv....
Your point is valid, but hardly new.
Suggested reading: "Medium Cool"...Marshall McCluen.
TV, & newspapers are not "fast enough" for our torrid pace of events. TV has come a long way as we saw on 9/11. And as it has since the advent of satellite broadcasting in the early 60's. But still it takes some setting up. If the tragedy of 0/11 it had not occurred in NYC, then we never would have witnessed what we did in real time. However we would have heard about it on the radio even 50 years ago. The TV medium is getting a lot warmer, but radio is as always the "hotter" medium. Newspapers, the coldest.
Now the internet is thrown into the mix. Due to it's immediacy, it is capable of being the "hottest" of all the media. But it is so rampant with fraud and misinformation that it is not reliable enough to be completely dependable. It is like an untamed undomesticated animal set forth in a world not quite ready or perhaps prepared is a better word.
When Jerry Garcia died, by coincidence I was on a Usenet site for guitar players at the time. The WWW was not yet in common use (hard to believe how fast THAT has changed!!!!). Anyway, someone close to Garcia, or in the know somehow posted the news and it was virtually instant information. On or about the very same time (maybe it was a week or whatever....time blurs details), I read on that very same "alt-dot" newsgroup that Peter Townsend from the Who had died. As it turned out, it was some World War I British war hero named Peter Townsend. The devil is in the details.
Certainly McCluen had no foresight for a medium with the potential "heat" of the internet. It will mature, and the world will be a smaller place still than even now. Hopefully for the better. Probably for the better.
Free speech seems unstoppable with the internet. A sharing of ideas and exposure of other cultures is something that seems to be an inevitable good thing. But it is still in it's infancy (as sophisticated as it is already). It is hard to believe that when Clinton was elected President, the World Wide Web consisted of a handful of sites. Now there are billions. I found an old issue of PC Magazine a few years ago from 1993. Dell had their ever present fold-out back cover. But no Web address. Seems almost impossible to believe now. Seemed almost impossible to believe when I found the issue. I think it was in 1997 or so, when it was only four years between worlds.
Peace,

RS