International Pocket Radio

ONE OF MY FAVOURITE iOS apps is TuneIt Radio because it connects me to pretty much any place on earth. It does its magic by tuning into radio that is streaming on the internet or by finding audio segments that stations have saved in their archives. I can get hundreds of stations (and police scanners and air traffic controllers) while walking the halls at work or while connected to my Mifi dongle on the road. When I dial into a Chinese chat show, I may not understand the chatter but I feel more connected. Occasionally, I plug the aux audio leads from a six-year-old kitchen radio into the earphone jack of my iPod Touch and that old appliance lets me tune into anywhere that's streaming its signal on the Net. There's something about having a little box on the countertop that connects me to the earliest moments of electronic entertainment. Because radio is the great survivor medium. It's a century old and still occupying more hours in the average Irishman's week than network television. And it's the medium that's most frequently mentioned by every cohort of creative multimedia students in Tipperary Institute. Now that it's pocket-sized, streaming and international, I think it's got a stronger essence than local newsprint.

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