Radio Communication is Our Last Line Of Communication During Catastrophic Events

Radio Communication is Our Last Line Of Communication During Catastrophic Events.

For over a century now, radios provided an excellent medium for communication and really provided us with our first form of mass-communication. Radios allowed a medium for people to get news, listen to music and be entertained. However, recently, radios started falling behind the time and are now not the first option for entertainment as it has been in the past. But, in an emergency situation, radios still provide one of the most safe and reliable mediums to communicate information.

Radios, As A Technology, Continue To Be Replaced and Is Slowly Dying.

I can remember my grandmother telling me a story once, saying that when she was younger families would gather around these large radios that they had in their living room to listen to shows and hear about the news of the day. This is similar to what families do today but instead of radios being the entertainment technology, we now watch television. Sadly, this is a reoccurring trend throughout the history of radio. Just as television ended the era of radio shows a half century ago, advances in music technology is threatening the future of all radio. Radio used to dominate the music industry, but started to get slowly knocked off by cassette tapes, CDs and the IPod. It’s now easier and more convenient to use programs like Spotify or Pandora on your phone, giving you all the music you could ever want to listen to right in the palm of your hands. I performed a survey, and asked students about their radio usage. Exactly 50% said they rarely ever use radio and only 15% said they use it multiple times a day. 

But, no matter what other technological advances arise in the future, radio will always exist as a reliable and widely used form of communication for one simple reason: it’s free. All you need is a radio and you can connect to stations that are within your range and hear free music and free news. All of the other technologies that have started stealing some of radios music market share cost money, whether you're directly buying the songs or paying for a monthly or yearly subscription to a music site. There will always be people who can’t afford or don't want to pay for music meaning that the radio can never die. There are also many areas in the world that don't have all the advanced technologies that we have in the USA, leaving them with the very cheap and reliable radios to entertain themselves. 

However, When All Else Fails, The Radio Will Still Work.

Catastrophes happen and there's nothing we can do to stop them, but we can be prepared for them. Communication is vital in emergency situations as people need to know what’s going on around them and where they can look for aid. But what if the power grid goes out? Televisions won’t work and the internet will be down. Cell phones are only reliable for a short period of time before their battery power dies. Plus phone lines may be damaged or destroyed if it's a bad situation or some phone lines stop working because of the large influx of people trying to use them. Everybody needs to have something consistent and reliable in these situations. While radios are never the first thing people go to any more for their news, it’s the technology that you need during a crisis. In the event of a severe storm, a military crisis or natural disaster, radios provide a way to stay connected because of their portability and their ability to work on battery power alone for a long time. 

Radios are a helpful tool for people trying to figure out the situation, but it’s also an irreplaceable tool used by first responders such as police and firemen to communicate in these situations. There are also amateur radios, also known as ham radios, which can be used by regular civilians and can access emergency lines, although they need a permit to do so. This article shows some examples of amateur radios being effectively used in large scale crisis situations such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1994. In both situations these ham radio operators gave useful information to authorities that helped them react to the situations quicker and safer. The good thing here is that people are aware that radios can be very useful in crisis situations. I asked a question in the same survey as to whether or not people would try to use a radio to get useful information in a crisis situation and 80% of people said that they would. 

Radios Are Used Everyday On Campus To Keep Us Safe

I am currently employed as a Facility Supervisor at the Eppley Recreation Center on the University of Maryland Campus. In my job description, the first thing listed is that I am responsible for the safety of every patron at the gym and the security of the gym. I had to get CPR certified in case someone needs assistance. The way that we communicate at the gym is through the use of radio. Every staff member and supervisor in every part of the gym has a radio that is always on and mine is always attached to my hip, as I do a lot of walking around the gym. 

We use the radio to communicate so that everyone knows whats going on at all times. We specifically need them in the event of a catastrophe, which thankfully hasn't occurred yet while I've been on duty. In that event I would need to get in touch with workers from every part of the gym quickly to make sure that all patrons can get out of the gym or to the safest area as quickly as possible and radios allow us to do just that. 

Overall radios have always been and remain to be a very efficient tool for communication. They allow us to contact others as well as be entertained by the news and music of the day. While it may be dying in popularity, especially among younger people who have more advanced technologies to take up their time, it will never disappear because of its ease of use, efficiency and low operation cost. They also provide us with a valuable tool in emergency situations and can allow us to communicate when other technologies will fail us. 

An Interactive Visualization of NBA Teams Winning Percentages Over The Course of a Game

I found an interesting article at FiveThirtyEight Sports that had an excellent example of an interactive graph. It is a graph that shows all 30 NBA teams and their percentage chance of winning their game, on average, at different times in the game. Every team starts out at 50 percent at the start of the game, but as the graph continues onward, teams go in all different directions. At any time in a game, a team's winning percentage can be calculated based on the current score and how much time is remaining. I think that it is a fairly easy graph to use if you understand what the numbers are meaning. In the graph, you can highlight any team that you want, and scroll your mouse left or right to find their percentage chance of winning at any time in the game. For example, if I highlight the Washington Wizards, I can find that on average at halftime of every game this season they had a 56% chance of winning, and by the start of the fourth quarter they had a 60% chance of victory. The drawback to this chart is that it may be too small for how much data is on it, making it challenging to focus on one particular spot.

Interactive Media, Like Video Games, Has A Larger Impact on Human Behavior Than Passive Media, Like Television.

Interactive Media, Like Video Games, Has A Larger Impact on Human Behavior Than Passive Media, Like Television.

By Timmy Kelley

          Forms of media have become increasingly important in lives of people and influence people significantly. Some forms of media, like video games, allow users to be more personally involved and are much more interactive than other media forms, like television, a more passive mode of media. People who are personally and actively involved in their media, like playing video games, are impacted and influenced more than users who use less involved media, like television. 

           The world that we live in today can easily be labeled as an information society, which simply means that information production and knowledge has become the most important aspect. People are constantly on different forms of media in hopes of obtaining all the information that they can. However, most people don’t realize the impact that media has on our thoughts and behaviors. That is the idea behind the concept of technological determinism, the belief that technology causes certain human behaviors. Whether we like it or not, our media usage changes us, for better or worse, without any cognitive recognition that a change in our behavior is occurring. 

            All media has the ability to influence behavior, and this can be shown by looking at the link between aggression and watching television. There are a lot of aggressive television shows and sports games that anybody with a television can watch at any time. People don’t realize that even by just watching violent acts on the television, their behavior is slightly changed, and the more television that is watched, the larger its effect. According to a New York Times article, investigators at Columbia University performed a study and found a link between watching television and behaving aggressively. The researchers followed children in 707 families in two New York counties over 17 years. Their results showed that adolescents and young adults who watched television for more than seven hours a week had an increased likelihood of committing aggressive acts later in life. Just by simply watching television, the subject’s attitudes and behaviors are changed by what they see on the screen, in this case resulting in aggressive behavior later on in life. 

           However, not all form of media have the same effect on people due to the amount of personal engagement involved. Video games are one such form of media where people are actually controlling the actions of the characters they’re playing as. Any time you want your character to shoot a gun or kill a zombie, the person has to physically press a button to tell the character to perform such an act. When simply watching a violent movie, people are removed from all the violent acts and not directly involved in them and they still have an impact. But when playing video games, people become actively involved in the actions, causing them to have a larger impact on real-life behaviors as video games can tend to desensitize us to the actual violence that is occurring. An article on PBS about the link between video games and violence quotes Rowell Huesmann, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, saying “The important thing is repetition. I think any child can play Grand Theft Auto or a first-person shooter a few times, and it’s not going to have much effect. But if they play day in and day out, over a period of years, any psychologist who understands the power of observational learning is going to find it hard to believe that it’s not going to have a major effect on increasing risk.” The fact that video games are an interactive medium, as compared to television which is more passive and less interactive, amplifies the influence that it can have over people, especially children who are still growing and learning how to behave in the world. 

           The major research focus associated with video games is how they make people more aggressive. But the fact that they are such an influential form of media should be viewed as a positive thing instead of a negative. Instead of researching how they make us angrier, psychologists should investigate how we can use it to improve aspects of our behavior. Why can’t we harness video games ability to influence people, and use it to help teach kids both right from wrong or use it as a way to make boring lessons more interesting? As technology continues to improve exponentially from year to year, we need to continue to improve our understanding of how it impacts us and our behaviors.

           Form of media have, and will continue to influence human behavior. Highly interactive mediums such as video games have a larger influence due to the amount of interaction and decision making that is not present when simply watching television. Hopefully, we can find a way to use video games as a way to improve our lives and influence behavior in a positive way.

 

Introduction

Hey! I'm Timmy. I am a junior Economics major here at University of Maryland. I have been born and raised in Maryland and love the state. I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy who loves sports and doing normal things.