Although I have lived here since 1988 (admittedly with a 4 year break back in London), I still have great affinity for the BBC. My iPod is full of Podcasts from BBC Radio. My favorite is the weekly H2O Show from Radio Solent, a local BBC station on the South Coast. Its presenters include Robin Knox-Johnston. This week's Podcast was especially good as it included interviews with Ben Ainslie and a chilling story about cruisers who were boarded ar robbed in St Lucia.
A few weeks ago, the show launched a Facebook page which I promptly joined. I left a rather gushing post on their wall. So, one week later, I am walking briskly down 7th Avenue with the throng heading for Penn Station. My iPhone is strapped on and I am listening to the latest H2O Show podacst when they start talking about their Facebook page. Lo and behold they start talking about posts on their facebook page. RKJ's co-presenter says:
"And we got a nice post from Adam In New Jersey saying bla, bla…"
I almost fell into the street. It was so surreal. Here I am over 4000 miles from the source of the show listening to a recorded show that doesn't broadcast much North of Hampshire, listening on a device that didn't exist 2 years ago talking about something I said on a web site that most people had not heard of 2 years ago.
In the words of Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commader "What a fascinating modern world we live in"
Facebook to Radio to Podcast to iPhone? Pretty cool.
Wait. Are you telling me that Twitter wasn’t somehow involved in this scenario? Lame!
Only joking. You be da man.
Well possibly if you linked to the post through Twitter as I have my blog set up to broadcast to my Twitter feed automatically.
I am looking forward to a new pocket protector any day now
Oh yeah. Of course. Now I get it.
I could be using Twitter to read your blog post about how you are listening on your iPhone to a podcast about a post you made on Facebook.
Could I be using my Blackberry (if I had one) to use Twitter to read your blog post about how you are listening on your iPhone to a podcast about a post you made on Facebook?
The medium is the message.
Sure the medium is the message but to me the thing that was that this weird disconnected conversation that the internet has become still surprises me.
When I think back to my first 10 years living here I felt dislocated from “home”. Well now, I feel home can actually be here because some of the things I miss are still accessible and I can actually engage with them in a better way then frankly if I were back in the UK.