Broadcasting, Narrowcasting, and Nullcasting

In the early days of radio and TV broadcasting, there were only two or three broadcast transmitters in existence and on the air. There weren't all that many listeners, either. For most of the 20th Century, large metropolitan areas had only a handful of radio and TV stations broadcasting to a sizeable listening audience.

The rise of Cable allowed many more channels and the advent of niche marketing, whereby a given channel devoted its program content to some narrowly construed demographic audience.

Today, webcasting technology is so ubiquitous that anyone can become an online publisher or webcaster with essentially zero capital investment.

With so many people publishing personal blogs or running personal audiocast stations, we've gone well beyond broadcasting and narrowcasting to nullcasting.

Nullcasting is where no one is listening (not even the robots which tirelessly index these sites).

I used to go to dreadful departmental meetings where the dominant practice was that everybody wanted to talk and nobody wanted to listen.

Now we've achieved that goal in spades. We can all nullcast to our heart's content.

And then, when we finally notice that no one is actually listening to our nullcasts, we can go back to being as alienated, isolated, and broken-hearted as ever.