This morning Chris Scicluna, a local media & PR specialist, kindly invited me to address his breakfast show on the subject of social media and cloud computing. My rant was to travel through the almost forgotten FM airwaves.

After diligently doing my bit and dragging myself to the radio station at 08.30 (without the help of the three mandatory morning espressos), it hit me: the irony of discussing new media while sitting in the felt-covered, old-media radio studio.

I realised I don’t actually own an analogue radio in the first place. Why would I need one? The only prior purpose was to double-up as an alarm clock, a function long performed by my faithful iPhone 3Gs.

Radio lacks the lustre of ‘on demand’. It contradicts the very ethos of social media on that singular premise: it can’t be consumed at the user’s demand, speed or request. It must be consumed when the radio-station sets it to be consumed (or it’s lost forever). Social Media allows me to bookmark and consume later; or even collect posts into a group which I can react to at will. I can schedule blog releases, or I can automate a social process to occur when I’m actually not connected. Social Media allows me to bend time – radio bends you to schedule your listening by its preferences.

And let’s not get started about participative interaction. It’s all well and good for the invited speakers to contribute to a topic in the studio, but forget the crowd-sourced opinion polling you’d experience in social media. Radio seems to shrink the reality of the ‘speaking’ mass.

I guess that within a few years, radio as we know it today, will be dead. The heritage of the medium will probably be applied to a social-activity; maybe a real-time participatory podcast or a more audio-visual facebook. Digital natives will not accept a one-way channel, digital migrants will crave more control on the time, place and type of content they consume. Farewell crackly tuning noise.