Radio Cultures

Radio Cultures
Author: Michael C. Keith
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780820486482

"Radio Cultures examines the manifold ways in which radio has influenced the nation's social and cultural environment since its inception nearly a century ago. Written by leading scholars in the field, chapters address a wide range of topics, including how this powerful medium has impacted and affected non-mainstream segments of the population throughout its history and how these repressed and neglected groups have employed radio to counter and overcome discrimination and bias. The use of the audio medium for political, economic, and religious purposes is comprehensively probed and analyzed in this insightful and innovative volume."--Back cover.

Record Cultures

Record Cultures
Author: Kyle Barnett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472131036

Record Cultures tells the story of how early U.S. commercial recording companies captured American musical culture in a key period in both music and media history. Amid dramatic technological and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s, small recording companies in the United States began to explore the genres that would later be known as jazz, blues, and country. Smaller record labels, many based in rural or out of the way Midwestern and Southern towns, were willing to take risks on the country’s regional vernacular music as a way to compete with more established recording labels. Recording companies’ relationship with radio grew closer as both industries were on the rise, propelled by new technologies. Radio, which had become immensely popular, began broadcasting more recorded music in place of live performances, and this created profitable symbiosis. With the advent of the talkies, the film industry completed the media trifecta. The novelty of recorded sound was replacing film accompanists, and the popularity of movie musicals solidified film’s connections with the radio and recording industries. By the early 1930s, the recording industry had gone from being part of the largely autonomous phonograph industry to being major media industry of its own, albeit deeply tied to—and, in some cases, owned by—the radio and film industries. The triangular relationships between these media industries marked the first major entertainment and media conglomerates in U.S. history. Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio.

Listener Supported

Listener Supported
Author: Jack W. Mitchell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2005-03-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 031301793X

Public radio stands as a valued national institution, one whose fans and listeners actively support it with their time and their money. In this new history of this important aspect of American culture, author Jack W. Mitchell looks at the dreams that inspired those who created it, the all-too- human realities that grew out of those dreams, and the criticism they incurred from both sides of the political spectrum. As National Public Radio's very first employee, and the first producer of its legendary All Things Considered, Mitchell tells the story of public radio from the point of view of an insider, a participant, and a thoughtful observer. He traces its origins in the progressive movement of the 20th century, and analyzes the people, institutions, ideas, political forces, and economic realities that helped it evolve into what we know as public radio today. NPR and its local affiliates have earned their reputation for thoughtful commentary and excellent journalism, and their work is especially notable in light of the unique struggles they have faced over the decades. This comprehensive overview of their mission will fascinate listeners whose enjoyment and support of public radio has made it possible, and made it great.

The Cultural Work of Community Radio

The Cultural Work of Community Radio
Author: Katie Moylan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2019-02-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1783489340

Community radio is an established and key site for negotiations of social and political issues for marginalised communities. Given its inherently local nature (both geographically and ideologically), community radio is perfectly placed as a site for articulating community concerns. At the same time, given this local quality, the diverse ways in which stations—and broadcasters—negotiate their community concerns vary substantially from city to city and region to region across Canada and the US. The Cultural Work of Community Radio investigates the multiple modes of community and broadcasting practice at selected community stations, explores how these draw from and reflect ongoing concerns of their host city or region, and examines how on the ground practice maps on to overarching broadcast policy directives and guidelines. Focusing on community production practices with reference to policy frameworks around community representation, this book examines and compares differences in community radio production practices in Miami, Montreal, New Orleans, Toronto and tribal lands in Arizona.

Radio Modernisms

Radio Modernisms
Author: Aasiya Lodhi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1000042944

This collection interrogates and stimulates deep, cross-disciplinary engagement with the various understandings and interplays of ‘radio modernisms’ from the early decades of the twentieth century through to the 1950s. Academics from a range of different disciplines explore their common interests in the richness and heterogeneity of BBC Radio’s imaginative programming – in terms of sound; as cultural events from specific moments in time; as team creations; as something experienced live in the domestic context; and as cultural works that, in many cases, attracted a certain canonical pedigree. Radio modernisms are, as these chapters demonstrate, a combination of the particular, the contingent, and the contextual. More than a decade after the publication of the first scholarly works to yoke together ‘modernism’ and ‘radio’, this collection emphasises the plurality of ‘modernisms’ as a defining aspect of contemporary BBC historiography. The authors bring multiple lenses to bear – including race, gender, and transnationalism – in order to (re)locate twentieth-century radio programming in broad, expansive contexts. They also underline the dynamic entanglements of radio – and radiogenic feature programmes, in particular – with other kinds of media and cultural forms and formats, reframing radio as a site of and vehicle for remediation and intermediality. In examining the myriad ways in which radio gave shape to new modernities, and both evolved and constituted new forms of modernism, this collection offers fresh perspectives on the interconnected significance of ‘radio modernisms’ within the socio-cultural, literary, and political landscapes of twentieth-century Britain. This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.

Sound Streams

Sound Streams
Author: Andrew J Bottomley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-06-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472126776

In talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past. Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience. Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture. What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks. Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.

Radio in Africa

Radio in Africa
Author: Elizabeth Gunner
Publisher: James Currey Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781847010612

Radio is 'Africa's medium', with an ability to transcend barriers to access, facilitate political debate and shape identities.

Radio Art and Music

Radio Art and Music
Author: Jarmila Mildorf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2020-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 149859980X

This book explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political relevance of music in radio art from its beginnings to present day. Contributors include musicologists, literary studies, and cultural studies scholars and cover radio plays, radio shows, and other programs in North American, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and German radio.

Radio Fields

Radio Fields
Author: Lucas Bessire
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2012-11-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814738192

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centres it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists.Radio Fieldsemploys ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

Radio's America

Radio's America
Author: Bruce Lenthall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0226471934

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.