Today, radio is filled with everything but itself. It is, as McLuhan observed, one of those formally original mediums now using other mediums as its content. Mostly, radio is now about the record industry, and this general reliance on musical “products”, produced and pre-recorded completely outside the realm of radio, is typical of radio’s retreat to a status of reference medium. […] This mediumistic “necessity” to couch all content in a bed of explanations extends even more to whatever forms of new art mass media does decide to present. The confusion level, particularly in experimental art, is so great that mass media virtually never allows us to experience it “raw”, as the artist intended. Although few art concepts include announcers doing biographical intros, summary outros, or analysis of any kind, when such works appear in mass media such mollifying comforts are apparently indispensable. Again, our mass mediums are not interested in being something, they only want to be about something.
“Get Your Own Show”, Don Joyce
