Is radio succumbing to the greed of the internet?

‘Young people under 16 don’t want to listen to the radio unless there’s a picture to look at,’ said Annie Nightingale on the Today programme. It was Saturday morning and I was only half listening. But this woke me up sharpish. Nightingale was talking to Sarah Montague about the new ‘Harlem Shake’ craze on YouTube but she also enthused about the new Sunday-night Radio 1 show hosted by Dan and Phil, whose ‘visualised’ radio show I’ve already discussed. She’s right, of course; how can we expect young people brought up on the web, and glued to their iPhones and iPads, to be satisfied with listening to words or music or conversation without a screen to look at, filled with hectic moving images? But once pictures are also available as you listen, is there any chance that radio as we know it, as a purely aural experience, will still be going strong in the 2030s?

Perhaps surprisingly, radio survived the initial impact of TV in the 1960s, if not unscathed at least with relatively decent audience figures for the BBC stations. Is it now, though, succumbing to the unassuageable greed of the internet? The audience numbers published by Rajar suggest that listening numbers are increasing. But how are they listening and what to? 6 Music, which has grown phenomenally in the past year or so (ever since it was threatened with the chop), is digital-only, designed for the gadget-obsessed generation, and probably mostly listened to online. In a few years’ time will radio only be heard via a smartphone or laptop screen? If so, once a screen is there, won’t we expect it to be filled with pictures? And if so how will this affect our ability to take in stories, ideas, by word alone?

If, for instance, there had been an accompanying ‘visualisation’ for the poet Tony Harrison’s reading of his controversial verse ‘V’ on Radio 4 on Monday night, would we have experienced the poem differently? Would it have been more, or less, shocking?

Intriguingly, the poem was given its first public reading in 1987 not on radio, as you might expect for a poem that depends for its effects on the sound of words, their rhythms, cadences and often brutal aural impact, but on the upstart TV station Channel 4.