I grew up in New Jersey, not far from the swamps that later were re-labeled "meadowlands", after a sports complex by that name appeared alongside Paterson Plank Road. In those days, back in the '50s and early '60s, I was like any other geeky kid who had better luck with science than with girls: I sublimated unrequited desire for the latter into a preoccupation with the former. Since computers still were captive to big business, big defense and big science, I focused my science obsessions on big radio.

I could visit the working end of big radio by riding my bike down to the transmitters of New York's big AM radio stations, whose towers rose like alien crystals out of the tidal muds flanking the Hackensack River. There I'd hang out with old guys at WMGM/1050, WADO/1280, WMCA/570 and WINS/1010, learning the relative merits of Continental, Westinghouse and RCA transmitters, the directional effects of multitower arrays, the relative efficiencies of towers trimmed to various fractions of wavelengths and the mysterious variable called "ground conductivity". Although eastern states generally lacked good ground conductivity, salt water provided the fortuitous exception. You couldn't beat tidal swamps if you were looking for a good AM transmitter site. The guys at WINS told me the station was disadvantaged by having an extremely directional transmission pattern. Four towers in a row aimed a signal not much wider than a flashlight beam across Manhattan, the inner boroughs and southern Long Island and out into the Atlantic. Yet the salt water path was clear all the way to Bermuda, where the station boasted a few listeners. The guys at WMCA told me the same thing. WMCA was only 5,000 watts, while WINS was 50,000 watts; but the longer waves at the lower end of the dial carried farther over both land and water.

As I grew up, and FM began to grow in popularity, I took more interest in VHF radio propagation. On FM and TV--which flanks the FM band, channels 2-6 below and 7-13 above--waves are only a few feet long at most. Divide the distance light travels in a second by the frequency, and there's your wavelength. While AM waves carried along the ground or bounced off the ionosphere at night (which is why you can pick up "skywave" signals from AM stations hundreds of miles away after dark), FM waves traveled about as far as you could see from the transmitting antenna. That's why FM and TV stations transmit from the tops of mountains, towers and skyscrapers.

The idea in every case was to game nature. Or, rather, to take advantage of natural features and natural limitations.

Today, if I want to put a show on the radio, I don't bother with radio at all. I record an .mp3 file, put it on a Web site and "enclose" a pointer in an RSS feed. Anybody who picks up the feed or downloads the file can get the recording, anywhere on the Net. Which is "right here" for anywhere with a connection, anywhere in the world.

Which is why radio as we know it is doomed. Same with TV. AM and FM stations have a future as long as manufacturers ship cars with radios. But that future increasingly will be restricted by a growing assortment of other sources of what we've come to call "content".

Two stories, both from Tuesday, April 11, demonstrate this point.

"Trying to corral Stern's lost herd" is the headline of a story in the L.A. Times that begins, "Only a fraction of the audience followed the shock jock to satellite. Stations wonder where millions of ears went. Can millions of listeners just disappear?"

"Disney's Web Move Shakes Up Decades-Old TV Model" is the headline of a story in the Wall Street Journal with a subheading that says "Sorting Out Winners and Losers: Advertisers Reach More Consumers; But Local Stations Feel Shut Out."

The first story is the more clueful one, because it faces the undeniable fact that radio's audience is not a fixed sum but instead is comprised of human beings who have many choices about how they spend their time. The second story is framed by the assumption that a fixed sum of people still will watch the same sum of television, even if they're watching an iPod rather than a TV. It also fails to mention how Disney's plans to stream ABC and Disney shows over the Net. What technologies are involved? Will they be limited to one kind of client, say, Windows running Real or Windows Media Player? Probably.

What both miss is the evolution of consumers to producers and the obsolescence of "media" as a one-way construct.

Earlier this week, at the Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions [1], there was much talk about how young people are certain to be a boundless source of fresh content of all kinds, especially video. Sure, there still will be plenty of appetite for expensively produced and packaged TV and movie products. But there also will be an overwhelming abundance of independently produced TV, movie, music and other forms of what the professionals still call "programming", including traditional radio transmitted over packets instead of airwaves.

"It's only human nature", somebody said. In that case, we'll have nature gaming media, instead of media gaming nature. And the result will be the end of media as we knew it, as scarce, expensive and restricted ways for a few producers to reach many consumers.

The one scarcity that still will matter is time. Choices about whether to produce or consume will be made from a new state we've never enjoyed throughout the entire history of regulated industrial media. They will be independent.