Monday, October 1, 2007

YOU HAD YOUR TIME, YOU HAD THE POWER, YOU'VE YET TO HAVE YOUR FINEST HOUR: Once again, we find ourselves welcoming a new medium to the history of popular culture: radio. And once again, we need to step outside of our 21st-century worldview and try to imagine the revolutionary impact this new medium had on listeners in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike vaudeville, radio was consumed in the home. Unlike phonographs, it required just one initial purchase for years of entertainment. Unlike movies, it spoke intimately to the individual listener. And unlike any previous medium, radio transmitted the same program at the same time to a mass audience of millions.

After some early experiments with "wireless telephony," radio became a "broadcast" technology thanks largely to the engineering and promotional genius of David Sarnoff, who recognized in 1916 that radio could become "a 'household utility' in the same sense as the piano or the phonograph." By 1926, twenty percent of American households owned radios, on which they could listen to a wide range of broadcasts, from music and comedy to labor rallies and religious programs. At first, these shows were locally produced by small regional stations. Within a few years, though, corporate investors, realizing radio's national commercial potential, had created the first networks of affiliated stations and then turned to advertisers to pay for (and often develop) original programming. (See Chapter 7 in our textbook for Susan Smulyan's discussion of these trends.) This business model, so familiar to us today, transformed the form and content of radio: the key "product" being sold was now the audience, not the program, as networks tried to convince advertisers to sponsor shows that would reliably deliver a particular demographic.

Not surprisingly, then, radio shows ran the gamut of popular genres: situation comedies, soap operas, Westerns, suspense and mystery, even (improbably) ventriloquism, just to name a few. But what really distinguished radio during the 'twenties and 'thirties was the intensity of audience interest. Listeners felt actively engaged in their favorite radio shows: they stopped everything to listen, wrote millions of fan letters to beloved characters, and dutifully followed sponsors' injunctions to "tune in tomorrow." This deep, almost unquestioning faith in radio's power was both demonstrated and tested in October 1938, when Orson Welles' infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds led to widespread panic, as frightened listeners believed that Welles' fake news reports of a Martian invasion simply had to be true. After all, millions of other Americans were hearing the same thing at the same time.

By 1940, radio's own invasion of everyday life was nearly complete, as it reached into 86% of American homes -- that's more homes than had telephones, plumbing, or even electricity at the time. Yet over the following decades, radio would struggle to compete with both newer media (TV, Internet) and old rivals (movies, recordings). So, ThingThrowers, how do you use the radio today? Are there any programs or stations that you actively listen to? Or has radio simply become background noise for commuting to work or puttering around the house? Radio, does someone still love you?

No comments:

Post a Comment