The pioneers of wireless saw it as a gift to all the people. The BBC director-general Sir John Reith said that it would dispel “isolation of the spirit” and rejoiced: “It does not matter how many thousands may be listening, there is always enough for others … the genius and the fool, the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously.”
Between two great wars this technological innovation built a new kind of national consciousness. Opening this week, a book and exhibition curated by Beatty Rubens at the Bodleian in Oxford records how radio changed everyday life from 1922 to 1939, as primitive crystal-and-wire devices evolved into sunburst-grille boxes. She draws on letters, diaries and fiction, and a 1939 field notebook of verbatim audience research by Winifred Gill. There’s fun in testimonies of people enjoying the sheer newness. A cartoon mocks a group failing to converse because they’re all in headphones. People report that broadcast music made workmen whistle new tunes.
By and large the wireless was welcome. I loved the chap from the Thirties research who found that wireless suddenly offered “a lot of variety… things I thought I’d never be interested in… ice hockey, perhaps”. True: for more than 80 pre-digital years, linear speech broadcasting brought the gift of serendipity, random enlivenings of a car journey or dull manual task. In my

own book about radio I recorded how, on one drive: “I caught up with the news, learnt some 17th-century history, and was startlingly educated by an unpretentious programme on the history of the stethoscope.”
But radio’s enriching serendipity is ebbing. With multiple networks, BBC Sounds and countless podcasts, a smartphone user selects what to hear and when. And while it is wonderful to take a walk with anything in your headphones, infinite choice encourages us to shrink into niche interests and sympathetic beliefs.
A hundred years on from Marconi and Reith, is the art of mere listening endangered? Some will say the audiobook boom revives it, though I suppose you can then worry about the decline of reading. But inventions shape all of us and it is worth noticing when techno-social habits do change, and asking whether to control them a bit or shield the youngest.
Whatever we do. Innovation will happen. Today we fret about the isolating culture of smartphone-staring and selfie-vanity, but already in 1939 there was that lady regretting how, when all her street got wireless, it lost the neighbourly habit of “talking on the brush handle”. It’s enough to make a person put down the smartphone and go out front with a yard broom.

In the last paragraph, the author intends to express the opinion that __.