Open Source Radio and Arab bloggers

A public radio show with Christopher Lydon

I am thinking out loud on this page and inviting comments, please, about a very different sort of radio conversation that producer Mary McGrath and I will launch this Spring. (Production at WGBH, Boston. Syndication by Public Radio International. Sponsorship from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.)

Chris Lydon, wearing his intention

My own forehead-whacking “aha” moment came in Jamaica three years ago, and you can hear it yourself here. I was hosting a supercharged late-night talk show on RJR (”Real Jamaica Radio”) in Kingston — on smart topics across the board: prison reform to post-colonial sex, reggae literature to the Jamaican compound of African and British Empire identities. “Welcome to Jamaica, mon,” a caller began. “I’m calling from your town; I’m in New York City right now.” He was one of the 400,000 Jamaicans living in Brooklyn at that moment — many of them tuned every night to the live stream of their hometown radio. And he was calling on a toll-free phone to speak about his own several Caribbean and North American identities. Boltflash! We were at a brand-new omnidirectional intersection of local-global gab, with a Yankee talk jockey in Kingston and diaspora Jamaicans listening from scattered points on the globe and feeding back on emotional and political questions with some universal resonance. Aha, indeed. I saw a starburst of possibilities. So I took this movable intersection of broadcast and Internet radio talk to Ghana (topics: Highlife music, 20th Century slavery, foreign debt, contemporary Ghanaian poetry…) and then to Singapore (topics: the wealth and un-freedom of Singapore, its thriving satirical cinema, its brilliant Malayan, Indian and Chinese cuisines…). The phones never stopped ringing. For all the polarization after 9.11, there was unmistakably a border-crossing conversational culture out there, trying to happen.