The internet radio revolution

Every few days, it seems, I hear or read some techno-zealot with a vested interest explaining how Twitter represents the future of all media: that the decline of human communication into nothing but distracted, fragmented, slightly boring text messages is inevitable. Modern life moves fast, and the internet, we're told, favours the short and punchy over the long and discursive. But this is, of course, silliness: the real power of the internet lies in the way it plays host to diversity. Twitter's there if you want it, but so is the full text of War And Peace, and everything in between. And nowhere has the internet helped trigger a greater flourishing of the meaty, in-depth, long-form and geeky than in what it's done to radio.

Much of this programming was already there, to be sure, but to hear it you had to live in the right country. Today, I can as easily listen to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's brilliant All In The Mind and Ockham's Razor as to anything home-grown, and the fact that I'm currently based outside the UK presents no obstacle to hearing what might be the best radio programme ever, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Your location is about to become less relevant inside the UK, too: the BBC has just announced that it hopes to make nearly every radio station in the country accessible via a single online service.

No evangelising about great speech-radio podcasts would be complete without a mention of This American Life, the Chicago-made documentary series that tops a list of American public radio gems and is guaranteed to interest you in things you didn't know you'd be interested in. As such it stands in exuberant defiance of another piece of internet-era received wisdom, that all we want now is "niche media", tailored to our special passions. We don't: This American Life is the most popular audio-only podcast in the US. It came into its own recently with three superlative shows about the economic crisis - The Giant Pool Of Money, Another Frightening Show About The Economy and Bad Bank - to which I owe more of my understanding of current news than I like to admit.

Then there's all the stuff you were never able to hear on an old-fashioned radio, no matter where you lived. Admittedly, the boundaries blur here. Does the weekly New York Review of Books podcast (cerebral chat with critics, novelists, scholars) count as "radio"? What about the talks from the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, so full of brain-expandingly innovative ideas that one has to pause for a few days in between them, so as not to become exhausted?

I have no idea if any of this counts as radio, and I don't see any reason to care. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and listen to Melvyn Bragg interrogate academics about the Boxer Rebellion of 1899, a topic on which I plan to retain just enough knowledge to bore and annoy everyone within earshot.