Overview

The aim of this book has been to provide an overview of what is involved in putting together a web radio station: firstly, getting used to a new way of sending and receiving radio; secondly, understanding something of the environment of the Internet through which it is transmitted; and thirdly, identifying the ways in which radio content on the Web can differ from radio broadcasting as it has evolved over the last century. In each of these three areas, the book is a guide rather than a set of definitive instructions. It is an invitation to explore as a listener and experiment as a producer, because we do not know where this road is taking us: an invitation to research the possible routes ahead. In the process of this research, we may find out almost as much about old-fashioned analogue radio as about the nature of its upstart offspring. For those of us interested in the study of radio, the Web provides the most comprehensive toolkit:

• for comparing current radio practice internationally;

• the first widely accessible audio memory for radio contained on history and archive sites;

• the close proximity of competing media across new, leaky borders helps challenge our definitions of what we mean by good radio content;

• the absence of barriers to public transmission enables us to re-examine some fundamental assumptions that have survived generations of radio about, for example, media ethics and censorship, about intellectual property and what we mean by originality , and about the validity of...