At the end of this year Terry Wogan will be stepping down from his morning radio show. If you don’t know who he is check out this link. He has led the morning radio slot, on and off, since 1972 and is considered by many in the UK to be a national treasure. My morning drives to work are always accompanied by Terry chatting in the background and despite his advanced years he still makes me laugh every day. One quote I remember was when a listener asked him if he was good at cooking and he duly announced that “You will never find me straining my plums in the kitchen!” So, what does this have to do with smartphones? Bear with me on this.
The way in which Terry (Sir Terence to us mere mortals) delivers the news and commands two hours of radio broadcasting every day is second to none; he is effortless in his delivery and appeals to people of all ages with his wit, intelligence and opinions which are sometimes not overly popular. It is all about the delivery- a mixture of broad Irish married to an eloquence you could never reproduce digitally. It is of course possible to be eloquent in printed words as many authors, poets and commentators have shown, but the information we receive on a daily basis is so varied and diluted that it is hard to see past the words.
We live in a world of RSS feeds, websites and news channels and have so much access to information that the need to ‘get it out there’ quickly is often more important that the need to make it worth being there in the first place. The lack of character on the internet is wholly apparent because anyone can have an opinion not worth reading, like me:), and it can be delivered immediately over the magic of wireless communications. I read a lot of information during the day and little of it reaches the credibility or class you would find in a newspaper or on a radio show like Mr Wogan’s.
There is still a lot of quality writing on the internet and in theory we have better access to this quality than ever before, but I still feel like the personality gets lost somewhere along the way. Just as I will be saddened by the loss of Terry’s voice every morning on the way to work.
