Too Hot

There was a piece by Tom Haberstroh at Bleacher Report this week, a story about the NBA's social media obsession and what compelled Philadelphia 76ers guard JJ Redick to delete his Twitter and Instagram accounts and go cold turkey, a phrase that's apropos because social media has become an addiction perhaps like no other. You don't need me to tell you that, because you're probably doing what everyone else is doing, constantly checking your phone and tablet and computer for Twitter and Facebook updates. (I just did it myself.)

I don't need to tell you what effects that can have. You get agitated. You get aggravated. You see something with which you don't agree and you feel fire building in your heart. You see something you agree with and you STILL get a fire, because how in the world can anyone out there disagree, unless they're idiots?

Does that feel familiar? It should. That's been the modus operandi of talk and sports radio for generations. You say something to get the blood boiling, and blood indeed boils. Let's go to the phones. Anger as entertainment.

It works, of course. In fact, social media does what talk radio used to do in exactly the same way. State your opinion -- do NOT ask yes or no questions. Do it with passion. Take responses from people inflamed by your opinion, whether they agree or not. Keep it quick, keep the pace fast. Watch the audience grow. Talk Radio 101. Social Media 101, too.

It's good for getting listeners for talk radio. The question raised by people like Redick is whether it's good for the users, or for society, and while the latter is a larger issue that would take a lot of discussion and research to decide, the former really goes to simple questions you can pose to anyone who listens to talk radio or uses social media: Does this make you feel good? Does this make you feel better? Does this enrich your life? Or does this make you feel worse, angry, bitter, confrontational, even violent?

The interesting part is that you can answer all of those in the affirmative. There are benefits to talk radio and social media alike -- they can inform, they can entertain, they can make you aware of things you'd otherwise miss. And there's the hostility, the anti-social behavior, the trolling and the conflict and the pit-of-your-stomach unease. There's the anger. So much anger. Lots and lots of anger.

Does talk radio contribute to this? Sure. It always has, or at least it has since partisan political talk became a thing on the radio. (The days of "some people think A, others B. What do YOU think?" are long gone, and, truth be told, those were intensely boring talk radio days.) Talk radio, and sports radio, may not have invented the hot take, but the hot take and the hot reactions are what talk radio and sports radio do best.

Talk radio, of course, is finding its audience rapidly aging out. The core audience remains very old. The future is not likely to involve AM radio, but the question is whether talk radio in general needs to find another course; If people start to decide that their lives aren't being enriched by the anger on social media, are they going to want more anger from talk radio? I don't know the answer, because for every JJ Redick who realizes his life is being hurt by processing all the noise, there are millions who eat it up. You're not going to get people to stop looking at their phones all the time. That ship has sailed. (All right, maybe they will when they have AR glasses and don't need to look at their phones to access their social media. Or when we all have chips implanted in our brains.)

It does, however, also raise the question of whether there's value in offering an alternative that's not just a jukebox. Hot take talk radio is not going away, and there'll probably be a place for it forever, whether it's on the radio or as podcasts or social media or someone yelling at you on the sidewalk. But that's not the only way to do spoken word radio. Sometimes, people want funny. They want pop culture. They want serious issues treated without the anger and snark and fire. You might say that some of this is public radio's province, but there's a wide gap between "All Things Considered" and commercial talk radio that someone could fill. (I know what it could sound like and who could do it and how to do it successfully, but since nobody's paying me to develop that, I'll keep that to myself.) I can imagine that there are plenty of people who have bailed from listening to talk radio in recent years, people who might check it out if it didn't add to the aggravation of daily life. Maybe there's a way to reach them with entertainment that isn't going to raise their blood pressure, that has passion and energy but not the us-vs.-them of "regular" talk radio or social media.

There's more than one way to do this thing. Can we make room for something that doesn't make us want to scream?

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Where can you find topics that will cut through that screaming? Simple: Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports. Find your bliss by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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I'd have written about the convention I attended last week, the Radio Show in Orlando, but, I gotta be honest with you, there wasn't much to say that I didn't include in the daily news coverage, other than that repeating the word "data" over and over without indicating how you're gonna collect the data advertisers need in a form they want is kinda pointless, and that I still do not have any idea what Jewel was doing on the podcast panel. Seriously, I asked several people who would have known, and they all shrugged and assumed she has a podcast, but I haven't found that podcast and she didn't mention it on the panel. I have no objection to Jewel being there, but this is a mystery suited to be dissected on Season 4 of "Serial." If anyone knows what that was about, let me know and I'll put it here in a future column.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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