Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “New Communities”, an original extemporaneous improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
A new voice joins the conversation
About a hundred years ago, before radio became widespread, most people lived inside relatively small circles of information and culture. News traveled slowly. Music was local. Voices from distant places rarely entered everyday life. Then the radio arrived and spread with astonishing speed. Within a few years, people could hear music, ideas, and conversations from far beyond their immediate surroundings. The world suddenly felt larger, but of course, you needed a powerful enough transmitter to get far enough away to matter.
Then, streaming extended radio to infinity, just as it did to empower the newest version of newspapers, like The Berkshire Edge. Newspaper and radio now cross boundaries. They allow people to hear other accents, viewpoints, and styles of expression. Communities that had once felt isolated became connected to a broader cultural landscape.
A century later, a new voice is joining that long conversation. Here in the Berkshires, we are seeing a small but interesting example of this broader shift. CTSB, which has served the community for decades as a local television station, is expanding its reach with a new radio voice under the call letters WGSL. The station serves Great Barrington, Stockbridge, Sheffield, Lenox, and Lee, providing a hyperlocal presence rooted in the region’s daily life. Each medium plays a different role. Regional journalism connects the Berkshires to a wider audience. Local broadcasting anchors conversations within the community itself.
A new path for distribution
The exponential improvements in computing power, often described as Moore’s Law, have made tools available to individuals and small communities that once required large institutions. Today, a single idea can travel through many forms.
The Berkshire Edge, now in its second decade of publication, connects a wide circle of readers who care about this region. Many live here year-round. Others come from New York or Boston but feel a strong connection to the Berkshires. This permits the people in Boston and New York to be privy to hyperlocal events and activities.
What becomes interesting is when these mediums begin to interact. `A reflection written as a column may lead to a radio conversation. A radio conversation can become a television program. A television discussion may inspire a live gathering where people perform music, read from their writing, or present artwork. Each format supports the others. The boundaries between journalism, broadcasting, conversation, and cultural expression begin to dissolve.
100 years ago, American popular music did not include Latin forms such as Bossa Nova and Afro-Cuban, but radio broadcasts exposed American bands to new styles they had never personally experienced, and now these styles could be learned from afar. That same sort of transference of awareness has become exponentially more possible with streaming.
A new power: stylistic scaffolding
When different forms of expression begin to interact in this way, communication becomes layered rather than confined to a single medium. That structure might be described as stylistic scaffolding. This kind of stylistic scaffolding was not easily possible in earlier eras. The tools simply did not exist. Today they do.
Blending of forms reveals something subtle but powerful about communication. When different styles of expression are layered together, they create a kind of structure that allows ideas to move more freely. One form introduces another. Music frames conversation. Conversation opens the door to stories and reflection.
When stylistic scaffolding is present, communication becomes richer and more dynamic. Instead of a single voice speaking in isolation, multiple forms of expression reinforce each other and create a shared cultural experience.
Even the process of shaping ideas is changing. As I write this column, I am using a large language model to explore structure and to test phrasing. The technology does not replace human thinking, but it expands the range of tools available for expressing it. In a sense, it is part of the same long arc of technological development that began with radio.
When communication becomes layered, more people begin to participate in cultural life. Instead of a few institutions speaking to a passive audience, individuals begin to contribute their own voices.
In the Berkshires, we see this spirit in many forms. Musicians perform in small venues. Artists open their studios. Writers read from their work. Conversations unfold in theaters, libraries, and community halls. The population may be small, but the level of cultural activity is remarkable.
In a world that often feels fragmented and polarized, these forms of expression matter. They remind us that community is built not only through agreement, but through shared experience. When people listen to each other’s stories, hear unfamiliar music, or encounter ideas outside their usual circles, the boundaries between them begin to soften.
Radio once played an important role in creating that kind of shared cultural space. A century later, the technologies surrounding it have evolved dramatically, but the underlying possibility remains the same. Technology can connect communities. What matters most is how we use it.
