MAGAZINE

The night the whole world listened

There was a time when an entire family fell silent at the same moment, leaning toward a wooden cabinet from which a voice emerged. Radio was not something you watched: it was something you experienced together. A look back at the golden age of shared listening — and at what remains of it in the age of solitary earbuds.

In the 1920s, a wireless set cost as much as a small piece of furniture, and it was installed like one: in the center of the living room, at ear height, surrounded by chairs. When evening came, the lamp was turned down and people listened. The serial, the concert, the news from around the world arrived over the airwaves, free of charge, at the same instant in millions of homes. No one «chose» their program: people received the world as it presented itself, and this constraint had a charming name — the evening gathering.

On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old young man named Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s «The War of the Worlds» into a fake news bulletin. On CBS, listeners who had missed the announcement at the beginning believed a Martian invasion was really happening; the next day’s newspapers reported panic, congested roads, and overwhelmed telephone switchboards. The print press, jealous of its young rival, probably exaggerated the true scale of the episode — but it remains striking proof of one thing: a single voice on the radio could make an entire country’s heart beat in the same rhythm.

That was precisely the marvel: simultaneity. At eight o’clock, everyone heard the same song, the same joke, the same silence after bad news. The next day, they talked about it at the workshop and at school alike — because they had, quite literally, shared something. Radio wove a common present, an invisible thread stretching from one kitchen to another, from a country to its colonies, from a continent to its exiles.

Then came miniaturization. In the 1950s, the transistor took radio out of the living room and slipped it into a pocket; the Walkman added headphones thirty years later. Little by little, listening ceased to be a collective ritual and became an intimate act. People no longer listened «with» others, but «against» the noise of the world, each in their own bubble, each with their own soundtrack.

It would be dishonest to see this only as a loss. This individualization was also a liberation: the end of the single imposed program, the explosion of tastes, the possibility for a niche station — jazz, poetry, a minority language — to finally exist. Choice replaced constraint, and that is a good thing. No one truly wants to return to a time when three stations made decisions for an entire people.

But something quiet faded with the evening gathering: the happy accident, the discovery of something we had not been looking for, the feeling of belonging to a moment larger than ourselves. When we choose everything, nothing surprises us anymore; when we listen alone, we have somewhat forgotten the pleasure of listening together. The open window onto elsewhere closed, becoming a thousand small shut windows.

The good news is that none of those voices has disappeared. They are all still broadcasting somewhere — the jazz station in New Orleans, the public radio station of a country you can’t locate on a map, the century-old broadcaster that has never stopped through the night. All that was missing was a window to bring them together again. On Terondo, thousands of radio stations from around the world are one click away, free and without an account: not to force us to listen to the same thing, but to reopen the window — and let the whole world listen to us again in return.

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