How the Radio Show Went

So I did my first foray into radio broadcasting yesterday morning, and it was an interesting experience, to say the least. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect ahead of time, so it’s hard to say if my experience met those ambivalent expectations, but I definitely had a good time.

Leading up to going on the air, I was fairly nervous. Not knees shaking or anything, but some definite butterflies. I’d be speaking into a live microphone, and I’d have no idea who was listening. What if I sounded stupid? Not only that, but I’d be working with a variety of new technologies I’d only been told about. I’d never touched a single one of them. What if that went wrong?

Lots of what ifs.

But one thing nerves don’t care about is time. It keeps on plodding along, whether you want it to or not. And so the time came for the show to go live, and there was nothing for it but to sit down at the mic and turn it on. And once it was on, several things occurred to me at once. First, the world hadn’t ended. Second, this felt just like talking to people without having a mic involved. And third, I had no idea if anyone was listening at all.

There’s no way to tell. So other than remembering to speak into the mic and not move around too much, it wasn’t all that difficult once I got rolling. (Which is so often the case with me and nerves. Being nervous about things that really aren’t that difficult, in the end.)

We talked about Go (the game) and artificial intelligence. It was genuinely enjoyable, which I’m honestly a bit surprised at. I’m a fan of talking on the phone, for instance, but only when I’m talking to friends. I’m not a fan of talking to strangers. I thought maybe that dislike would bleed over into not wanting to talk on the radio. But no, it didn’t.

The plan now is to start recording our broadcast and then putting it up online as a podcast, so that more people can listen to it on their own schedule. In the meantime, we’ll keep going with the experiment. No show next week, though, since school will be on break. But the week after that, we’ll be back!

Maybe I won’t be so nervous next time.