There's something about over-the-air broadcasting. Tuning a radio has a way of making the world feel vast: picking up the clipped tones of a Beijing newscaster through waves of static, dialling into the current top 40 in Amman—these are experiences that make you appreciate how enormous and varied the planet is, like scooping a thimble of water out of a churning ocean.
The old days of TV were a similar story. There was nothing like idly channel surfing to remind you of what a diverse array of human experiences there are, from slick dramas to public access shows that seemed poised to collapse at any second. It's gone now, with the advent of on-demand programming. Or it was gone, anyway. Now we have Blippo+, freed from the Playdate and now on PC.
