Radio
Programs, Set Theory and Individuals
5/27/08
I
was listening to a National Public Radio program today, Talk of the Nation, and the hosts were discussing various topics with guests, and encouraging listeners to phone in or email them. The programs motif so to speak is based on
allowing listeners to be heard by as the name implies--the whole country
at large. But, as I listened to the callers that actually were put on air, an
idea of how many listeners actually could be heard on this program began to
form in my mind. The fact is very few listeners actually get the chance to speak
to the nation. This fact is not very hard to see. Let’s take a fictitious
example to illustrate it.
We
have a radio called You might get on the
air. It has 10,000 listeners. Now let’s see how many of that 10,000 can
speak to the nation in one hour.
Radio
You might get on the air =10000
listeners
Maximum
number of listeners that can speak per minute if we assume the whole hour is
devoted to listeners speaking is
10000/60=166
listeners per minute. This is a limit that the program will never reach. It is
clear the 166 people couldn’t be broadcasted in series speaking in one minute.
But
course listeners aren’t given 1 minute speak each, so let’s say we assume that
each listener is given (at minimum) 10 seconds to speak. Ignoring access time,
credits (even public radio has beginning and ending credits, though no commercials),
we can see that if 10 seconds per call was the limit then we have:
10
sec *6=60 seconds which equals 1 minute, thus 6 callers speak per minute. 6
calls per minute * 60 = 360 callers get to speak on You
might get on air.
The
percentage becomes 360/10000=4% (approx) spoke on air on Radio program You might get on the air.
These
percentages are also the probabilities of your getting to speak. It is
undeniably clear from this simple arithmetic that most of the people listening
to You might get on air are never heard
when they attempt to call in. The fact
is that most radio programs like this one that are nationwide have many more
than 10,000 listeners. Also, note I'm telling the probability if the entire
hour were devoted to listeners calling in. Of course, it's not. If we factor in
the time the hosts take running their mouths, the probability is even less. You
just have to count how many people you hear on air during a program like Talk
of the Nation and do the arithmetic with an appropriate guess of how large
the listening audience is, to see--very, I repeat very few are heard by the
nation at large. My count is about 6 to 7 at most! I need to qualify these
comments. First, I am sure there are
those who will cry no! no! no!
He's wrong. Suppose only 500 of the 10,000 attempt to call in, then the odds are much better? I've thought of these
objections too, and looked at what I project with differing numbers and
probabilities, but still the percentage is small and another example
illustrates. If only 500 of a possible audience size 10,000 attempts to call,
and we assume that say maybe...uh 30 minutes of the 60 are given over to
call-ins, then we have the probability of any one of the 30 getting to speak as
30/500=6% per minute. That's not a good chance again. The only way to increase
the probability of a caller getting on air, is to
increase the time allotted to call-ins, or a decrement in number of calls
coming in. Both changes are unlikely in my opinion. But, on the rare occasions
when the topic is uninteresting and there are not many calls, then more are
heard. The greatest probability would be if only 30 callers phone in the 30
minutes, then every caller should be heard if we ignore the obvious
constraints, access time, the screeners querying you before going on air, etc.
But, that is not likely. I have heard on many PBS radio programs that they
receive thousands of emails and calls. This is analogous to the numbers of
callers phoning in during these programs. So, fiddling the numbers of my above
estimation doesn't change the conclusion: most people are not heard on
air. The producers, hosts, and all others connected with these programs
know this! For them to suggest their program as some kind of vehicle for you,
the individual to be heard by the whole country is such a lie it makes me
angry. And it’s even worst than the simple arithmetic implies, if you don’t
play the game their way, even if you are chosen you won’t have the chance to
speak to the country If you use profane language or expressing opinions they
consider not appropriate you STILL won’t have your cherished chance to speak to
their 50,000 or so listeners. It borders on false advertising to me. It is a
lie that is foisted upon listeners to tell them to call in and let your voice
be heard when the probability at most (drawing from the fictional example
above) is 4% that they will be heard. Though I think its
deceptive and unfair to make these false attributions to listeners, I am much
more interested in what the radio broadcaster/listener experience implies about
human relations. It should go without saying that whatever I write about radio
as a media will apply to any other one-to-many relationship, such as TV,
the Net, magazines, newspapers. We will see using database theory terms and set
theory methods, that individuals have a special relationship with the
multitude.
As
individuals we are anonymous to the broadcasting world of radio. Of course,
they have all sorts of sophisticated methods of knowing us in general. They
typify us by race, age, stations we listen to, income, geography, consumption
patterns, sex etc. Yet even with these data the broadcasters (I mean the entire
organization by that term) don’t know us as individuals. That is to say, when
we tune in a program, there is no person or persons there to see and say… oh
that’s X, who is now lighting a cigarette, and okay he told his wife to be
quiet, and uh he’s going to take a uh let me see… oh yeah he’s taking a piss
before we start broadcasting that's old X, he always takes his piss before
listening to us. Thank the non-existent
God they don't have that power yet, huh? In fact, there is good reason why they
don’t have that kind of power yet: they couldn’t handle the information flow
that level detail would require, even with powerful computer monitoring
technology maybe in 50 years. No, we are
for them the amorphous, anonymous audience out there. We are the Many dialing into the One. The One
has the Godlike power to reach the multitude, while the Many is defined
by being a supplicating hoard seeking to speak to the One. Yes if you
noticed, this relationship is the same one that is characteristic of religious
experiences. When the Many at last finds and can talk to the One,
what happens then? This is equivalent in the radio example to a caller having
his chance to talk to the nation.
If
you’ve ever had the experience of being chosen to give your opinion on a
call-in radio show, you’ll no doubt know that it’s an overwhelming one.
When you hear your name announced on some radio program from such and such
place, and then the hosts ask you to speak, you are at first shocked to hear
your NAME called out and knowing you will be speaking to tens of thousands of
people, you are nervous and apprehensive. If you pull it off, you feel a sense
of worth and accomplishment. What has really happened in these cases is the many
has become a part of the one. You, the individual for those brief
seconds, become like the radio show host, touching the multitude out there.
You feel something akin to stage fright, your voice may crack, and you
might ramble, and completely forget what you had composed in your head, that
important point you were going to make, it now seems so small. Or contrarily,
you may take control of yourself and speak clearly, and put your point across
eloquently. In either case, you feel as if you’ve been given a power: the power
to communicate with some many, many others. And you also sense something comes
with this. You lose you anonymity in doing this. You are not a private person
any longer. This is disturbing to you. And why is that?
We
are, all of us private beings. We share the knowledge of our private states of
mind, by choice. We think in our heads and have experiences only known to us.
Privacy is a part of our existence we have from birth. The child sliding out of
its mother’s womb is a child experiencing that occurrence alone. That same
child while in the womb, if it has a rudimentary thought process anything like
it will have as an adult its
still doing this alone. Even its mother carrying it doesn’t know that it
might be developing thoughts. So you see, we are by
our very nature as living beings in this world-alone. And to be alone means to
be private. Not even a most fundamental bond like that of the pregnant mother
to her infant can break that necessary divide of being a living thing alone and
private unto itself. Is it any wonder that when we are called upon to share
ourselves through something like a radio broadcast, we feel a cringing in
ourselves?
Then
there is this need we feel to communicate with others. We are unto
ourselves a unified agency of states of mind. Still, we do want to know others
and communicate with them. I would venture to say, most of us want to touch
many others too. We want to be heard, by the many if you will as the one.
Most of the time, we only want to communicate as a one-on-one
relationship. Again another term from database theory, I’m using. We meet and
know others as individuals like ourselves, and are themselves alone as human
beings in this world. So what would ever make us want to know more than our
individuated experiences can offer? It is the social nature of our being in the
world that does this.
We
are a mix of several types. Humanity is not one individual or type of
individual. We are in our genetic combinations so many types (members) of one
set. The human set, which is outward and forming new relationships, and thus forming
new sets from its generating set, is a process that defines our social world.
This behavior in human beings makes me think we are somehow doing this from
something more basic. Let’s see if we can build a model of human communications
as a relationship of sets, then apply it to the radio
broadcast example above.
If
we take the set of integers, {0, 1,2, 3∞}, then
the only element of that set that under the operation of + has relation to
every other member of that set is 0. And every element of the integer set has a
one-to-many relationship with the number 0 called Identity. So, 0 is
like the broadcaster above, and we are like the other integers. The problem
here, is when we call 0, we get ourselves as the result. This is a very simple
set with rules that map in a way that the broadcaster never let’s
the members in the set talk to anyone but themselves. Not a very fruitful
example. So, let’s consider a set relation that widens the field and somewhat
approximates the radio call-in experience. Logarithms of base 10 can capture
this idea.
Consider
the series below:
It
is clear if we keep going on a set integers would be produced from increasing
powers of the logarithms of these base 10 numbers. Now go back to my original example. If we
consider the callers as the result of a logarithmic set, then we have the
following equation.
F(x)
=xlog10
This
set would generate every integer to infinity for powers of 10. What does this
mean? It means in simple terms, smaller numbers would be mapped to larger
numbers. This mapping approximates the one-to-many nature of radio
broadcasting.
For
example take 4 log 10 = 10000. We could see this as
indicating 4 people (the host and a small staff) communicate with 10,000. In
this manner, the radio broadcast experience can be said to have a logarithmic
relation. Though, to be more accurate about it, we’d probably have to change
the base of the logarithm. But, there are other ways to capture the
relationship between broadcaster and audience. Few examples will get us
started.
Take
the equation
F(x)
=√x for x≠1 and x is an integer
This
relationship is a function for all integers greater than 1. In other words it
is a one-to-one mapping. This relationship is said to be isomorphic,
since every input begets a unique output within the set of integers. This
relationship is more like a conversation between individuals than a broadcast.
Though, one person starts all the communicating, that is x starts
conversations.
Composite
functions also approximate one-to-one mappings, though less uniformly.
Take
the equations
F(x)
= 2x +1/x2
G(x)
=2(f(x)) +1=2(2x + 1/x2) + 1= 4x +2/ x2 + 1= 2/x2
+ 4x + 1
Here
for every input to F(x) we get a unique output in G(x), often called the image
of F(x). These sets are like the above isomorphic mapping and would be another
person-to-person sort of communication. However a subclass of composition known
as iteration is very much like an exchange in which one speaks and the other
responds using the information that was given from the original speaker.
Take
the iterative equation
F(x)
=
F(F(x)) for F(x)= 1/√x-1. It is a real-valued
function beyond 0 and 1
As
a non-iterated function this set approaches from the left (that is, decreasing
number values for x) the value of 0 as shown below:
F(x)
= 1/√x-1 = 0
Lim
x->∞
Which
means conversation dies off between the two mapped sets. It would be like a one-to-one
mapping, where one side stops communicating.
F(x)
= 1/√x-1 = 0 and
F((F(x))= 0 also.
Lim
x->∞
Embedding this
function in itself and taking its limit leads to again a slow slide to 0. It
will take longer no doubt, but the conservation eventually dies off.
None
of the above set mappings really captures what happens in the radio broadcast I
started this article with. But there is way to make the exchange between the
broadcaster and audience more symmetric.
We
now come back to the one-to-many set mapping we started with using base
10 logs. But instead of base 10 logs we will use base 2 logs. This set relation
provides a much more realistic model of broadcasting to a wide audience, for
instance look at this:
F(x)
= 20 log2 = 1,048,576.
Now
that is much closer to the kind of relationship a show like Talk of the
Nation has with its listeners. This mapping is saying that a staff of 20
can reach 1,048,576, but they don’t talk back much. Here is what I have been
leading up to: why not let groups of listeners form sets that can talk back to
the broadcaster as groups. The broadcasters will still decide what
listeners will have the chance to speak, but the basis for this decision has more equanimity, and would be representative of the audience. This model can be
made with set theory methods. It would be cost-effective in the economic sense of that term. You could dispense with the jerks screening the calls with this model.
We can use the
base 2 log above to develop a model that would allow
callers to radio programs like Talk of the Nation to voice their opinions in large numbers. The model utilizes the database theory idea of one-to-many, but its converse: many-to-one. for my model to be realized,
the radio shows producers would have to do more preparation to accommodate
their mass of callers. It would take an entire week before
the broadcast airs for the shows producers to set-up
what my model illustrates. This isn't asking too much of them.
After all, this program is the Talk of
the Nation, and it should strive be just that, right?
Go on to next
section Sets,
Radio programs and Individuals