Radio's bright future. (radio broadcasting)

Radio, which recently celebrated its centenary, is widely undervalued. People tend to forget how far it helped to shape ways of thinking in the twentieth century and to minimize the rote it is earmarked to play in the twenty-first.

The radio age ushered in a perception of the world in global terms, something that now seems self-evident but which drastically changed parish-pump mentalities and linked the destinies of villages and city districts alike to the unfolding events of our turbulent century. It was over the airwaves that news of revolutions, coups d'etat and wars came to the illiterate populations of the Nile and Ganges deltas, and that Indian, African and Caribbean music …