logic and radio

Posted on | July 8, 2009 | Comments Off

i was coming home from work,last evening, and like millions of people across mumbai,was listening to a random radio program.now,i am willing to accept the fact (if it is so,indeed) that one of the qualifications to host a radio talk show or be a RJ is probably that you either have to have a very low IQ or pretend that you have a very low IQ (i am not making a generalization here,it is not a conclusion,i just say that i would be willing to accept the fact if it was thus.i dont say anything about VJs here because i dont watch TV except for news and documentaries,and believe you me,news is more than enough!).

but willy-nilly,there was this prog i happened to come across which involved a guy and a gal being given a certain amount of rupees by the channel and being left into a mall or some such place and who ever could buy the maximum number of goods from that money would be the winner, or some such crap (i wasnt really listening carefully). and all this was being covered in great detail, and we were being given blow by blow accounts between which songs were being played.

now,this lead me to a very depressing trend of thought.on a rough guess,at the least half of mumbai’s population that commute to work by cars would probably be listening to radios. as there are some 7-8 major radio channels, it would be a fair guess that at least 1/8 of that population would be listening to that particular channel at one time,despite the channel switching which happens (i am making a probabilistic conclusion, not a nitpicking,TRP based one(which would vary a bit because some channels would be more popular than others),because what i wish to establish are trends,not excel sheets of data).

now,that such a dumb program was given airtime, and that in primetime when a major chunk of the city’s working population would be listening to their radios, PROVES beyond any reasonable doubt that SOMEONE thought that it would be listened to by atleast 1/8 of half of mumbai’s working population who return home by cars.now,i would submit that returning home from work by car would indicate a certain level of affluence that a working man would achieve in the normal course of things,only by being a pretty smart and diligent worker (at least in a majority of the cases). and so,someone thinks that nearly 6% of this population are idiots and need to be catered to by shows that are fit for people with IQ levels of imbeciles.worse,that someone who generated the concept, would have run it through his boss, and his team which worked on the program, and since they passed it to a go stage, they would appear to share his contempt for the intelligence level and tastes of atleast a fair sized chunk of mumbai’s more successful working population.a pretty scary conclusion in itself, that such deluded people run big companies and decide what we hear and what not.

but there is worse. these programs run because of the revenues that they generate from the adverts that are aired with them. these adverts are allotted to these programs by even other marketing executives. a justifiable assumption would be that these executives know what kind of programs they are deciding to air the adverts on,when they buy airtime. which leads to the even more outrageous conclusion; since that particular program was fairly hotching with adverts; that even they share the contempt which the radio concept designers have for the intelligence levels and taste of mumbai’s working population.

this whole discussion,i want to make two points only-there is probably some level of contempt among marketers about the level of general public’s intellect (despite being a marketer myself, i wouldnt know, because i do not market my products to the geneal public at large). and secondly, that even the most consistent flow of arguments can lead to absure conclusions if extrapolated too large in scale, which includes the final conclusion which i make in this article.so…the point would be that validity of arguments would, to some extent, depend on the scale they are applied to,even though their flow may be logical enough.

Similar Posts:

• radio and pastimes
• strange interlude
• Summer of 2010

Comments