And when do we listen to the radio?
I recall a (perhaps apocryphal) story from the early days of cellphones. A young
entrepreneur who'd made quite a fortune with a rather unexpected product successfully
made the move from hippie-dom to businessman. Except that he refused to have a
cellphone in his car. Being now busy throughout his day, he rarely, if ever, had
the opportunity to listen to the rock-and-roll that he so loved, and found that
he could do this only when alone in his car. If he'd install a cellphone he'd
be kept busy at that time as well, and wouldn't have a chance to listen to music
at all.
Until it stopped rejecting CDs (requiring me to fiddle with the unit well beyond
what would seem under warranty to get them out) I enjoyed having a CD player in
my car. But even when these were ejected correctly, I discovered that I used it
only on lengthy trips during which the radio would stop receiving signals at a particular
transmission. At other times, I preferred listening to the radio, not because
I actually liked the music I heard on the radio more than the music on the CDs
I could have brought with me, but because this was the only opportunity I had
to hear something new, something different, even something popular so that I'd
know what people were talking about.
Even though there's a certain logic to listening to podcasts while driving, in
order to accomplish something we might otherwise have to put time used differently
aside for, that would mean not hearing any radio at all.
Go to: The tedium of real time.