Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

Razlogova, Elena

Hardcover

Radio20th Century United States History

ISBN10: 081224320X
ISBN13: 9780812243208
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: Oct 13 2011
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

During the Jazz Age and Great Depression, radio broadcasters did not conjure their listening public with a throw of a switch; the public had a hand in its own making. The Listener's Voice describes how a diverse array of Americans--boxing fans, radio amateurs, down-and-out laborers, small-town housewives, black government clerks, and Mexican farmers--participated in the formation of American radio, its genres, and its operations.

Before the advent of sophisticated marketing research, radio producers largely relied on listeners' phone calls, telegrams, and letters to understand their audiences. Mining this rich archive, historian Elena Razlogova meticulously recreates the world of fans who undermined centralized broadcasting at each creative turn in radio history. Radio outlaws, from the earliest squatter stations and radio tube bootleggers to postwar payola-hungry rhythm and blues DJs, provided a crucial source of innovation for the medium. Engineers bent patent regulations. Network writers negotiated with devotees. Program managers invited high school students to spin records. Taken together, these and other practices embodied a participatory ethic that listeners articulated when they confronted national corporate networks and the formulaic ratings system that developed.

Using radio as a lens to examine a moral economy that Americans have imagined for their nation, The Listener's Voice demonstrates that tenets of cooperation and reciprocity embedded in today's free software, open access, and filesharing activities apply to earlier instances of cultural production in American history, especially at times when new media have emerged.

Also in

Radio

View All