I’ve spent a good part of my summer away from my usual gateway to the world, a high speed internet connection and a powerful desktop computer driving two large displays. Instead, I’ve relied on free wifi — public libraries, supermarkets, etc. — a 13-inch laptop computer, and radio.
I’ve learned some things, and I’ve got good and bad news for you.
Let’s start with the good news. Reasonably fast free wifi is widely available at public libraries and similar facilities, and at an increasingly variety of businesses. One needn’t wait to rent a motel room with five-bucks-a-day wifi before checking email, uploading blog posts, and checking the news and weather. One must, of course, keep a constant lookout for thieves trying to steal passwords. And working with a single display, especially a small display, slows one down.
The bad news? Radio. Before television, it was an important source of information. My parents remembered Edward R. Murrow, William L. Schirer, Walter Cronkite, William Shirer, Eric Severied, and others reporting from London, Berlin, Paris, and the capitals of Europe in the late 1930, and later from the battlefronts during World War II. That era’s radio newsmen did original reporting.
Those days are gone, have been for some time, and never are coming back.
As a test, the morning after the Kalispell City Council passed an anti-panhandling ordinance (I’ll address that mean-spirited law later this week), I tuned into the 0800 news on Kalispell’s leading traditional AM station. There was a canned national report, then a live announcer reading headlines from the police report and various press handouts. He clearly hadn’t attended the council meeting, the local newspaper hadn’t published its report on the meeting, and so he had no news on the subject. A quick weather report and it was back to music and talk shows.
So I tried National Public Radio, loved by many of my friends and acquaintances, which has announcers with cultured, anodyne voices, but not much more news. I switched off NPR, too.
AM radio, I concluded, is for Republican voting beer drinkers who like hearing Rush Limbaugh reinforce their biases, while NPR is for Democratic wine snobs who like having their sense of social superiority reinforced by always calm and measured announcers and highbrow music. Neither is anything more than a headline service. Neither keeps citizens well enough informed to cast responsible votes, a conclusion for which the proof is found in the last election returns.
I’m beginning to think that staying properly informed on the road requires traveling in a motor home with a satellite connection for high speed internet, a powerful Macintosh laptop with a 24-inch second display, air conditioning, and no radio.