Remember the radio? Of course you do. It’s not hard to remember. It’s still around. You can buy a little one on Amazon and tune into AM or FM. Cars still have them, for now. You can enjoy classical music on public radio, political commentary on talk radio, the game on a Friday night, or whatever else there is floating around on the airwaves at any given moment on any given day.

Before TikTok there was Facebook, and before Facebook there was MySpace, and before MySpace there was television, and before television there was radio, and before radio there was silence.

'Who else is listening to this right now?' That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know.

Imagine what that transition was like — from silence to radio.

Big world

I’ve been reading “Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio” by Anthony J. Rudel recently, and in it, Rudel writes at length about that time and transition from silence to radio sound.

The world was so big in those days. Rhode Island was so far from Spain, and Ohio was so far from Rhode Island. In that big world of people without Social Security numbers or anything like our panopticon of 2026, there were millions and millions of little worlds. Towns, blocks, clans, families, and people all in their own little worlds, living and breathing in silence.

Radio was, in some way, a beginning of the modern world as we know it. Of course, there have been many symbols of many beginnings in different and disparate domains, and radio was one of them. The ability to transmit a message across the land to anyone else who might want to listen was the beginning of mass communication and mass modern society. In hindsight, it was the first step in a long march toward Instagram, Facebook, and X.

When media was social

But radio was nothing like today's social media. The people who listened to it still lived primarily in embodied communities — families, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Radio expanded that world; it did not replace it.

Social media has done the opposite. Millions of us now inhabit synthetic networks populated by algorithms, bots, AI-generated content, and strangers selected by recommendation engines rather than real proximity. We are connected to more people than ever while becoming increasingly detached from the human beings physically around us.

Radio felt like a kind of modern magic. Voices traveled across the plains, through the night, and into your living room, making a vast country seem smaller. Yet those voices still pointed back toward a shared human world, answering one of humanity's oldest questions: Is anybody out there?

Beautiful uncertainty

There’s something beautiful about how terrestrial radio isn't completely predictable or reliable. Fishing, not knowing what you might catch when throwing your line in the water is like that. Driving and just letting the road go is like that. Tuning into the radio, passing over static as you turn the dial right, hearing faint music or voices covered by the gray sound, and landing on a station you haven’t heard before is like that.

Driving late at night with one hand on the wheel and the other on the dial, scanning from station to station, seeing if there is anything worth listening to is different from looking through Spotify playlists or flipping through CDs like we once did 20 years ago. Spotify playlists somehow feel like shopping at the store, and CDs felt like something private, while radio stations feel like something almost — almost! — communal.

“Who else is listening to this right now?” That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know. There’s no way for the radio station to know. There’s no way for anyone to know who’s listening in their car or in their bedroom or in their kitchen.

The sound is sent out into the world on a certain frequency, and those who are tuned in hear. There is no history of it marked, there is no documentation logged, there is no surveillance state knowing you listened that night. Ah, the sound of freedom.

RELATED: Goodbye, car radio? Big Tech’s plans to control what you listen to behind the wheel.

Ron Schwerin/Getty Images

Batter up

Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s aesthetics, but whatever it is, there is something so damn American about listening to a baseball game on the radio. The game sounds better over a little tinny speaker with crackle and static than it looks on a 96-inch flatscreen. The way the announcers sound, the way they describe every detail, the distant cry of the crowd in the background. You imagine sight in your mind behind your eyes as you play out what they tell you.

Maybe the beauty of radio is the fact that we don’t have control once we finally land on a station that’s clear. Someone else chooses the music to play or the words to say, and it’s there in the background, and everyone out there who’s listening listens. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, maybe it’s all right, but it’s just what there is, and it’s fine. I think we might get sick of making so many choices these days. There’s too many choices. Going on a ride with someone else is nicer than driving ourselves.

If all this is just nostalgia, then it’s a nostalgia for a world that hadn’t quite yet evolved, or rather devolved, into the global cyber panopticon we have today. It was a world teetering on the edge of technological modernity; one still with the magic of the old little worlds; one that was peering over the fence toward the future and everyone else far away. It was a big world out there, and we could only hear just a little of it.

It was tinny, scratchy, and it was magical.