Have you heard the latest? People are addicted to their smartphones. “We now see smartphones as dangerous for young minds,” writes Jean-Louis Gassée in a Monday Note.
More than 30 years ago MIT professor Sherry Turkle postulated that computers weren’t just a tool, but were sneaking into our minds. In doing so, they would change our relationship with the world around us.
Smartphones are Mobile Computers
Turkle would continue her thoughts on this subject in a 1995 book “Life on the Screen, Identity in the Age of the Internet” saying “computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including our ways we think about ourselves and other people.”
Smartphones plus Social Media
When our mobile computers are married to a social media site like Facebook, things get really sticky. Sean Parker, a founding partner at Facebook, wrote about the problem after he left the company saying, “[Social Media] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other…It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it is doing to our children’s brains.”
Time for Apple to Build A Less Addictive iPhone
The NY Times published an article by Farhad Manjoo that made the case for a less addictive iPhone. Can you imagine someone writing that broadcasters should be making TV or radio less addictive? That watching too much TV or listening to too much radio might be bad for our brains.
Broadcasters today find they have a different problem. They have lost the addictive luster of the past.
The Amazon Addiction
“For many businesses, Amazon is simultaneously a sales channel, a potential service provider and a competitive threat,” says Forrest Research. For broadcasters, Amazon is attacking our retail advertising revenue, by undermining the very businesses we sell to. Today Amazon is the go-to website for retail search, surpassing Google.
Trying to compete with Amazon is a retail challenge. The very retailers’ broadcasters depend on for their revenue.
Retailers measure how well they’re doing by their bottom line.
Amazon is all about increasing top line sales growth. (Wall Street hasn’t demanded Amazon to be profitable yet.)
See the problem?
Trying to beat the Amazon model is a race to the bottom with pricing for our advertising customers.
Free shipping, two-day shipping, lowest prices, biggest selection, customer ratings etc. are among the things making Amazon addictive.
People Made Radio Addictive
Over the years, radio has had personalities that made the medium addictive like Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Ingram, Larry Lujack, Robert W. Morgan, Jess Cain, Dale Dorman, Paul Harvey and many more.
Once upon a time, music formats could be addictive, but today’s access to streaming audio is challenging that beachfront.
Alexa Doesn’t Know My Local Radio Station
My local radio stations are called KISS (WKSI-FM) and WINK (WINC-FM). When I ask Alexa to play either KISS-FM or WINC-FM, I get the Los Angeles KIIS-FM or the WINK-FM licensed to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
When I asked Siri the same questions, she couldn’t help me play anything. Siri told me, “Sorry, Dick, I can’t help you with that on your iPhone.”
When your branding is not unique, these new consumer voice activated devices don’t have a clue what you’re trying to ask them. They either make their best algorithm guess or just throw in the towel.
Broadcast Station Call Letters
The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) solved this problem early in broadcasting by assigning each broadcast station its own unique call letters, but broadcasters abandoning those identifiers for branding like Kiss, Froggy, Hot, and others, that are duplicated all across the country, is now a problem in a voice activated world. But it’s not just the brand not being unique, the programming is likewise just as non-unique.
Don’t Be Generic
No one ever became addicted to a generic.
Addiction stimulates parts of the brain that trigger craving and longing, that release habit-forming, feel-good chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.
Your iPhone does that for you.
You voice activated smart speaker does too.
Broadcasting is show business.
Which do you think stimulates the part of the brain that causes addiction? The show part or the business part?
Answer that question correctly and you’re on your way.
DickTaylorBlog 
Dick:
Do your local stations have a stream of their own? Try looking at the Tune-In App. Cheers Jay
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Yes, they do. But Alexa doesn’t know them as WINK and KISS when you ask to hear them. That’s the problem with such identifiers. They are locked down by the first station to “own” them with Amazon evidently. -DT
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It’s all about Stepping Up & Standing Out! And, it doesn’t cost money to do it with a decent signal & culture.
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Dick, great take on this. Like I am surprised. Your column is appointment reading for me. So, I find YOU addictive! LOL
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Thank You Rick. -DT
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Professor Turkle’s thesis dovetails nicely with Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” McLuhan noted that any new medium (not just electronic, but all mediums, such as transportation, etc..) change our relationship to the world around us. So what is the “message” of digital, interconnected media? Is the Internet a “hive,” with Amazon, Google, etc. the “queen bees,” and we the drones, being relentlessly data-mined, with the results of that data-mining being refined and sold to the highest bidder? That’s one possibility.
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Great observation Gary. Thank you for sharing. -DT
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Great Read !!
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Thank You Professor. -DT
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