An Audience of One

Both of the manga I’m reading at the moment, Tune in to the Midnight Heart and Insomniacs After School, feature characters with personal broadcast radio stations via Internet streaming. I’m an avid streamer of podcasts, but that’s a slightly different flavor of online audio content that’s more curated and episodic than spontaneous. So, is this a thing Japanese high schoolers do? The short answer is, “I have no idea.” 

Tune in to the Midnight Heart. Masakuni Igarashi. Kodansha.

What’s interesting is that the protagonists in the aforementioned manga both maintain their closest relationships using streaming broadcasts to an audience of one person. If characters are confessing their feelings, it’s quite indirect when done through the radio. In my day, texting was the thing kids did; I guess radio is the new thing. I feel there’s a material difference in pretending you have an impersonal audience instead of just directly speaking to your friend. The question becomes, “Why do it this way?”

Modern dating is bad because men and women are doing a poor job of communicating or have nothing good to say. Many people blame the internet for creating information silos that breed stupid opinions and false facts, and this means men and women’s interior worlds are more easily exposed (and increasingly appalling to one another). Because much of our human interactions are mediated through text, I'd say that from a communications theory standpoint, the issue is this: sending texts is information-deficient when compared to radio — even an indirect broadcast conversation — because our voices carry messages through tone and volume, clarifying the intention of our speech. Text, as anyone who’s ever sent one can share, is notoriously hard to interpret even when intentions are good. It’s also easier to be an asshole when hiding behind your keyboard or firing off a quick message without thinking twice. I feel like using our voices is an extra level of personal investment and confidence that helps us be judicious with our words. (Unless you're Alex Jones, of course.)

Insomniacs After School. Makoto Ojiro. VIZ Media.

Radio broadcasts to my wife sound like a cute idea, but would quickly grow old because we already live with each other. For high schoolers who want to treat radio as a form of public journaling and indirect confessional, however, the practice seems harmless. If you don’t want your parents to see your call history, it’s certainly one way to avoid getting into trouble for talking late into the night. Ah, the beauty of being young…