Sounding board/sounding bored

While it's true that the Internet can sell you a book or provide e-Books for free, use gazettes in its research and tell you places you can read magazines, allow you to watch television - in the form of web series - and film, stream theatre and the coverage of live events in often unexpurgated form, it's no less ephemeral than radio if the site is taken down or the particular item you're looking for, removed. 

Web does radio. Does it ever. As searches revealed so often, you can listen to the radio stations themselves on streaming services. Superior in the sense that I can listen to the first commercial AM station I ever listened to, 6MD, or see what its FM counterpart (successor?) 6MER is all about, even though I am now 3,597.7kms from where it's located. This is something DXers could only dream of.
Indeed, the reach is formidable. If anything, the drawback is there is too much choice; making the grab for audience and advertising dollars all the more challenging.

Listeners to talk radio now have podcasts vying for their attention and music lovers can get very specific on music streaming services.  Many cover both.

Sound Off

 The first thing to remark in bringing the Internet into it is, in some circles I'm sure, Game Over. Even that lucky or precise find of the Radio National broadcast saved on their page is part of the Internet, a feature of the World Wide Web. 

But that's no fun. 

The next thing to note is that comparing how the Web deals with cross-cultural semantics on Usenet newsgroups, message boards, and social media to radio is useful when looking at the interaction on talk radio and from listeners of a show who are invited to phone in, but is not so all encompassing to be an accurate yardstick. There are a range of views and there is often a mediator but much radio more resembles a static website where there is little or no two-way communication. The typical model for entertainment and educational content is the announcer interviewing a specialist guest. This is the model in our Radio National example.

Similarly the blog is a discourse that mainly flows in one direction with perhaps a few invited comments on each post. LiveJournal presents a round of same while, within the field, Translation Journal is another good source. The subject does lend itself to some worldwide navel-gazing.

Radioing round

 As we also saw, radio brings you the newspaper, radio has book clubs, radio discusses magazine articles and interviews scholars on their research papers and specialist journal outpourings, radio gets you in the mood for a musical or puts you off seeing a movie.  Radio says what it wants about television. Radio is a platform for zealots and dilettantes; bots and tots and whatnot. Wot.  

So it remains to again apply the blowtorch sound effects and see how differently radio treats a subject to its counterparts. There are two ways of doing this: by taking a subject that someone has noted the discussion or examination of on air and then related in some other, less ephemeral, form or by transcribing something direct from the radio. I will probably sneak back to do the second but, since this takes considerably longer, we will settle for the third hand account first. If that makes sense.

The next task then is to find out if there has been any such discussion on our subject, which we'll put as 'cross-cultural semantics'. We find one on Radio National and then we see what newspapers and magazines, movies and television, have to say.*

*the blogger's solution to a trend for hyperlinks to give us more of the same - commentary on radio rather than commentary on the radio - was to check in with IMDB for movies and Trove for paper products. While no newspaper really addressed this high-falutin' subject matter, Realtime. mentions 'cross-cultural' a couple of times in their write-up and they appear to be some magazine or journal about on screen material so covers the gamut in some respects.

(Of course the Radio National link, having captured the conversation, eliminates any real need to sit recording or transcribing some new chat. Back in the day, the only reason you'd sit by your radio cassette was to press record when your favourite song came on; DJ patter didn't get much of a look-in.)