Radio As Medium Research Paper

Although radio has a variety of scientific and commercial applications as a technology of radio wave transmission (e.g., radio astronomy, radio telegraphy, radio telephony), as a social medium radio has been configured principally as a means of point-to-mass communication or broadcasting. Two broad models of radio broadcasting emerged during the first half of the twentieth century: commercial broadcasting and public monopoly broadcasting. While both models defined the radio wave spectrum as a public resource or good, they differed on whether the spectrum should be exploited by competing private entities for profit or developed by a single public entity as a nonprofit service. During the last quarter of the twentieth century both commercial broadcasters and community-based nonprofit broadcasters challenged the public monopoly model and launched new and hybrid broadcasting forms. This research paper examines the cultural, technological, economic, and political factors that shaped radio as a social medium of broadcasting.

1. Technology And Cultural Form

Radio is comprised of a dynamic sound technology wedded to a flexible yet resilient set of cultural practices. This combination of technological and cultural factors both enables and constrains radio as a medium. Radio production, for example, is shaped by the capacities of the technology (real-time, soundonly) as well as the forms of expression that have been adapted to the medium over time (program genres, formats, and presentation styles). Radio reception is likewise constrained. For example, a Walkman radio differs from a console radio in both its technological configuration and in the cultural assumptions that shape its use (mobile-individualized listening vs. situated-shared listening). This interaction of technology and culture shapes not only the form and content of the radio medium, but radio’s relationship to time, space, community, and identity.

In this sense, a defining feature of radio as a technology and cultural form is its conflicted relationship to modernity. On the one hand, radio broadcasting represents a heightened sense of movement towards modernity; that is, movement toward a condition in which human social relations are increasingly abstract, individualized, and future-directed. To the extent that radio is understood to speed up processes of social progress and development (through, for example, the diffusion of innovations) the medium evokes a sense of ‘hypermodernity.’ On the other hand, radio provides a means of resisting or allaying the impact of increased mobility and rationalization in social life. To the extent that radio is used as a tool for building intimacy and community in an individuated and changeable modern world, broadcasting practices are ‘anti-modern.’

Radio broadcasting both reflects and constitutes uniquely modern forms of social organization. It works to integrate and coordinate an increasingly mobile, dispersed, and complex society, at the same time that it promotes the privatization of social life. The simultaneous access of vast numbers of isolated listeners to a single radio content creates a virtual common space that tends to become coterminous with the nation (due, in part, to government regulation and commercial market formation). In this way, radio, like print and cinema, acts as a medium for the ‘community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (Anderson 1991 p. 36).

At the same time, however, radio voices have a materiality that reproduces the immediate, tactile quality of primary morality in a number of ways. Roland Barthes’s concept of the ‘grain’ of the voice is helpful in characterizing the somatic presence of radio voices. Barthes (1990) describes the grain as ‘the body in the voice as it sings;’ that is, the listener’s sense of the physical presence of the performer in the sound of his or her voice (p. 299). Walter Ong (1995) argues that radio talk has the same ability as oral speech to envelope and immerse listeners, uniting the audience ‘with themselves and with the speaker’ (p. 74). Indeed, broadcasters actively work to recreate the sociability and interactivity of oral settings by developing intimate, chatty forms of radio talk. In this way, radio gives listeners a sense of continuity with older forms of intimacy and community at the same time that it enables distinctly modern forms of social life.

2. History And Political Economy

Radio has historically been deployed by a range of political and economic institutions largely within the bounds of the nation-state. During the last two decades of the twentieth century radio changed from a predominantly public service medium to an eminently commercial one. To understand the meaning of this global transformation it is necessary to investigate the social forces that guided and shaped radio broadcasting beginning in the 1920s. Among the most important influences on the medium have been national and transnational communication corporations, the state (nationalist and expansionist) and community groups.

2.1 Beginnings: The 1920s And 1930s

Radio expanded from a means of point-to-point communication to a medium of point-to-mass communication, or broadcasting, during the 1920s and 1930s. The rise of broadcasting was both shaped by and reflective of larger political and economic changes in the first quarter of the twentieth century, including the rise of transnational communication corporations following World War I (e.g., Philips, RCA, Telefunken), the growth of product marketing, increased trade in cultural goods (e.g., film and recorded music), and the escalation of both nationalism and international expansion. Technological developments including voice broadcasting (replacing Morse code) and high-power radio transmissions were also necessary ingredients for broadcasting.

Approaching the medium as a strategic communication technology, scarce resource, and tool for national integration, central governments began asserting control over the radio spectrum in the 1910s and 1920s. In part, this followed the pattern established by state intervention in telegraph and telephone development. As a US Commerce Department publication lamented, ‘When the social possibilities of broadcasting became apparent many countries determined upon maintaining it as a public utility, particularly those where government ownership of communication services had previously been the rule’ (Batson 1932, p. 2). Even in the USA, however, the central government claimed radio as a public resource and used regulatory powers to promote a national broadcasting system with citizenship and public service requirements for broadcasters. These regulations, codified in the 1927 Radio Act and again in the Communications Act of 1934, granted concessions or licenses for commercial broadcasting and actively encouraged the development of commercial networks on a national scale.

Radio was shaped by the climate of intense nationalism and international expansion in which it was born. In industrialized countries radio was viewed as a means of consolidating the nation as both market and polity, strengthening ties with colonies and dependencies and opening foreign markets. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began its Empire Service in 1932, while the Japanese government established broadcasting stations in occupied territories in both Korea and China. US media corporations such as the Radio Corporation of America, General Electric, and Westinghouse financed broadcasting stations in foreign markets in order to promote the sale of radio receivers (e.g., Latin America). In less industrialized countries and colonial territories broadcasting rarely reached beyond a few major cities and was often limited to the interests of colonial governments (e.g., Hong Kong, Kenya).

In post-revolutionary societies such as Mexico and Soviet Russia, as well as fascist countries like Germany and Italy, the state turned to radio as a tool for building political solidarity and cultural identity through official broadcasting projects and the distribution of radio sets for both public and in-home listening. In Nazi Germany inexpensive radio sets known as the ‘People’s Wireless’ or ‘Goebbel’s Lips’ allowed listeners to tune in to Adolf Hitler’s speeches but blocked the reception of foreign stations (Euromedia Research Group 1997, p. 79). In almost all independent countries radio developed within a nationalistic framework: Broadcasters were required to be citizens transmitting from national soil, the state was given special access to the medium on the grounds of national interest and security, and content was frequently regulated to promote and ‘improve’ the national culture (e.g., language and music requirements).

Although radio broadcasting took many different forms, two broad types of radio organization—commercial broadcasting and public monopoly broadcasting—emerged during this period. In the commercial model, radio programs were designed to attract large audiences that could be sold to consumer product advertisers through program sponsorship or ‘spot’ advertisements. This model predominated only in the USA and Latin America, although Canada, Australia, and New Zealand had significant commercial radio sectors and small pockets of commercial radio existed elsewhere. In France and Luxembourg, for example, private broadcasters transmitted commercial programs in direct competition with the BBC (e.g., Radio Luxembourg, Radio-Normandie). In the vast majority of countries and occupied territories radio was a public monopoly (or modified monopoly) financed by government subsidy or receiver license fees and subject to varying degrees of government control. These two general models yielded different geographies of broadcasting: Whereas public monopolies tended to produce a small number of stations serving the national community (with limited regional or local service), commercial systems tended to generate a large number of stations serving the local community. With the rise of national networks, however, local commercial affiliates developed a strong national orientation.

Only countries in North America and Western Europe approached universal radio access by the end of the 1930s when, for example, about 75 percent of the British population had radios. One of the most influential broadcasts of the era, Franklin Roosevelt’s first ‘Fireside Chat’ of March 18, 1933, was heard by an estimated audience of 60 million (out of a total population of about 120 million). Urban and industrializing areas of Latin America, Oceania, and Asia, including the Soviet Union, had small but growing numbers of radio listeners. Rural parts of these regions, along with most of Africa and the Middle East, had negligible radio listenership.

2.2 Take-Offs And Transitions: The 1940s And 1950s

World War II had a major impact on radio organization, content, and listenership. Timely broadcasts of news and information greatly increased the utility of the medium, promoted frequent listening and raised demand for radio sets both during and after the war. Radio listening grew even in countries where most people could not afford radio sets (e.g., Egypt) ‘because merchants or owners of coffee shops would have a set to attract customers’ (Dabbous 1994, p. 65). The role of the central state in broadcasting also increased significantly on both the domestic and international fronts. At home, the state took an interest in the security and efficiency of the radio system. Official reports and government-sponsored programs proliferated on both public monopoly and commercial radio stations. In some cases (e.g., Vichy France) the state used the wartime emergency to prohibit private broadcasting and institute a public monopoly system.

International broadcasting was exploited by all of the belligerents during the war, largely in response to Italy and Germany who invested heavily in short-wave broadcasting. The BBC, for example, became the medium for Charles de Gaulle’s appeals to the French Resistance, beginning with his celebrated broadcast of June 18, 1940. The US government developed international broadcasting projects aimed at Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In the case of Latin America, the US Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs developed a wartime broadcasting offensive that worked to solidify US hegemony in the region while strengthening the cultural influence of US advertisers and a small number of Latin American broadcasters. In 1948 the Coordinator’s radio unit was transferred to the US State Department where it became the Voice of America (VOA) broadcasting service. By the end of the war, international broadcasting became the provision of the central state.

Radio broadcasting became one of the most important ideological and political tools of the Cold War. Along with international broadcasting, the USA, Soviet Union, and their allies sponsored clandestine radio stations in countries around the world (e.g., Guatemala, Turkey, Yugoslavia). The mobility and low cost of radio, however, also made it a powerful tool for grassroots revolutionary movements in the postwar period. Communist insurgents in China in the late1940s and revolutionaries in Cuba in the late 1950s used clandestine broadcasting stations to maneuver against their enemies and mobilize popular support. Fidel Castro’s Radio Rebelde, for example, became a model of effective clandestine broadcasting for decades to come.

Most of the countries that fought for independence at the end of World War II (e.g., China, India, Indonesia) followed a path similar to earlier postrevolutionary societies: They established state-directed broadcasting systems that controlled language and content and used the medium for nationalist ends. New governments struggled to improve broadcasting coverage and increase listenership quickly and efficiently. Consequently, broadcasting services were often highly centralized and limited to one or two national services (e.g., the Central People’s Broadcasting Station in Beijing, China).

The history of radio in the postwar period was also shaped by the rise of a second broadcasting medium: television. Although television fundamentally transformed radio broadcasting in the USA during this period, television’s impact was much more gradual worldwide. Radio remained a public monopoly in most countries and a strong competitor for the national audience. In parts of Europe (e.g., Italy, Norway, Sweden) television failed to reach a majority of the population until the early 1960s and in Latin America the high cost of television guaranteed that radio would continue as the primary mass medium. Indeed, this period can be characterized as a golden age of radio in countries with developed broadcasting systems. In Latin America, for example, popular music (e.g., mambos, rancheras, sambas) provided the primary material for broadcasting while the radiono vela (drama serial) reached the height of its popularity. In both commercial and public monopoly systems this was an important period of genre formation, with the live production of musical variety programs, comedies, soap operas, novelas, news, and game shows filling the airwaves.

In the USA radio changed radically beginning in the early 1950s. In order to develop national television networks, broadcasting corporations like the National Broadcasting Company stripped capital, talent, and program genres from radio and ultimately dismantled their national radio networks. Without national network programming, radio stations were forced to reorient their activities to the local and regional level and cultivate new markets (e.g., teenagers, ethnic minorities, and out-of-home listeners). Radio content became increasingly diversified and localized as radio shifted to a repertoire of recorded music supervised by disk jockeys (DJs) who advertised products and promoted the radio station. By the late 1950s stations were catering to narrow market segments with increasingly standardized program formats (e.g., ‘beautiful music’, and ‘top-40’).

Overall the early postwar period was marked by two divergent trends in radio broadcasting. While richer Western countries moved away from radio and toward television as the primary broadcast medium, many newly independent, postcolonial countries looked to radio as the primary tool for national communication and unification projects. Although television came to symbolize development, it remained impractical for the vast majority of countries due to high costs and infrastructure limitations. Beginning in the postwar decades, then, a significant divide emerged and grew between countries that saw high levels of television penetration beginning in the second half of the 1950s and those in which radio remained the primary mass medium through the late 1970s and beyond.

2.3 Change And Competition: The 1960s And 1970s

Public monopoly broadcasting remained dominant during this period despite technological changes and increasing competition from television. In the countries that emerged from the last major wave of decolonization (e.g., Algeria, Nigeria, Uganda) public monopoly broadcasting with strong government influence was the norm. In their study, Broadcasting in the Third World, Elihu Katz and George Wedell (1977) noted the tendency towards government control of radio broadcasting in many developing countries. In the case of Nigeria, for example, they observed that: ‘The demands of a government needing to assert its authority over a country of 50 million people of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics, between 70 and 80 percent of whom were illiterate, made closer control of broadcasting inevitable’ (p. 83).

At the same time, however, public monopoly broadcasters faced growing criticism for controlling and limiting public information. In India, for example, a 1964 government report noted that ‘Suspicion of official information has deepened in India because of an incorrect, even improper use of media for personalized publicity and an undue accent on [government] achievements … ’ (Ninan 1998, p. 4). In France, during the political crisis of 1968, listeners turned to commercial radio stations outside of France (the peripheral stations) to hear balanced coverage of events that French radio covered with a progovernment bias. In many countries protests against the public monopoly system were registered in the form of unlicensed, pirate stations operating within the national territory. While some countries managed to stave off reforms, significant liberalization began during this period. For example, Italy legalized private broadcasting in 1976 and Sweden permitted noncommercial ‘neighborhood radio’ as early as 1978.

During the same period commercial broadcasting (both television and radio) came under attack as a wasteland of low-quality programming that failed to meet basic public needs for information, education, and culture. In the USA, legislators responded with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 which created a public corporation that helped to finance educational television as well as National Public Radio, a public service national radio network. In Latin America, where radio became accessible to the majority of the population during this period, most governments either initiated or greatly expanded the use of radio in national education projects. Overall, this period witnessed a sizable growth in educational and nonprofit broadcasting by diverse civic groups, including religious organizations, universities, and other nonprofit groups.

Although radio listening increased worldwide during this period, the divide between rich and poor countries continued. Radio’s growth in the developed world was driven, in part, by innovations such as frequency modulation broadcasting (FM) and transistor radios. While FM radio made high-fidelity broadcasting possible, inexpensive transistor sets increased radio’s portability outside of the home and facilitated the expansion of car radio. In the USA, for example, both innovations helped to push the number of radio sets to 1,813 per 1,000 population by 1975. In the developing world, however, FM expanded much more slowly due to the costs of conversion from amplitude modulation (AM) receivers. In addition, although inexpensive transistor sets made radio much more accessible to communities without electricity, the price of batteries remained prohibitively high for many listeners. Thus radio penetration remained relatively low in poorer regions of the world at the end of the decade. Asia and the Middle East, for example, had 62 sets per 1,000 population while Africa had 70 sets per 1,000 population in 1977 (Katz and Wedell 1977, p. 62).

2.4 Liberalization, Deregulation, And Consolidation: The 1980s And 1990s

The move to reform public monopoly broadcasting that began in the 1970s grew enormously during the 1980s. Liberalization was a response to a variety of pressures: social pressure to increase political and cultural pluralism over the air, political pressure to reduce public spending (especially during a time of economic crisis), and ideological pressure in favor of free market capitalism. This process was particularly evident in Western Europe, where local noncommercial stations were legalized in the early 1980s, followed by commercial stations in the mid-to late- 1980s (e.g., Belgium, Denmark, FRG). In many cases, the radio system was opened to allow competition at the local level while the public monopoly on national radio broadcasting remained in place (e.g., the UK).

After the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s, most of the world’s radio systems faced liberalization of some kind. Much of Eastern Europe became an unregulated market open to competition from North American and European companies (although, in fact, development remained limited due to severe economic dislocation in the region). In Africa most countries opened their radio systems to commercial broadcasting, although commercial development was also highly circumscribed by economic conditions. South Africa, for example, began to liberalize its broadcasting system in the mid-1990s with the privatization of some government-owned stations, licensing of new commercial stations, and the establishment of community broadcasting. Only in the Arab world did monopoly systems remain largely unscathed.

What began as liberalization in the 1980s became a move toward market regulation in the 1990s. As commercial broadcasters grew and faced local competition, they moved toward networking, syndication, and consolidation at a national level. In Sweden, for example, although the Radio Act of 1996 prohibited multiple ownership ‘all but a few of the more than 90 commercial stations [were] closely integrated into four more or less national networks’ (Euromedia Research Group 1997, p. 218). A similar process took place in France where a political movement in opposition to the public broadcasting monopoly was ultimately exploited by commercial interests. Whereas the 1980s had been dominated by small, activist stations, the 1990s witnessed the ‘oligopolization of the private radio sector in France’ at the hands of professional broadcasting corporations (Kuhn 1995, p. 107).

The move towards market regulation also produced oligopoly in the US radio industry. Beginning in the early 1980s, deregulation removed federal content regulations and reduced the limits on cross-ownership of media. With the Telecommunications Act of 1996 all national limits on station ownership were removed, opening the door to a series of mergers and consolidations. By the year 2000 radio broadcasting had moved from monopolistic competition to oligopoly: Many major cities had one station owner with 40 percent of the market and some had two owners with 70 percent of the market. According to Charles Fairchild (1999) the 1996 deregulation aimed, in part, to make radio competitive with other consolidated media industries, thus preparing the radio system for exploitation by integrated media conglomerates. At the same time, developments such as Internet radio and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) provided ideal media platforms for the convergence of recorded music, text, and image through a real-time broadcasting-style format.

Radio reached almost every person on the globe by the end of the twentieth century. Radio listening continued to grow in the world’s expanding urban areas, primarily in the form of in-car and portable radio listening. Radio listening also grew in rural areas due to electrification projects as well as the development of low-tech, wind-up radio receivers that finally made radio affordable in areas without electricity. Radio’s popularity also increased during this period as broadcasters exploited the potential interactivity and intimacy of the medium. Listener-participation talk shows reinvigorated the medium and promoted public discussion of personal topics (especially personal relationships) as well as political issues in countries as different as China, Mexico, and the USA.

In the growing commercial sector, radio stations delivered increasingly standardized program formats to targeted market segments. Format-specific radio chains developed a ‘brand value’ or ‘lifestyle statement’ that could be ‘applied profitably to other aspects of their listeners’ lives,’ including other forms of media consumption (Hendy 2000, p. 47). Convergence and conglomeration in radio and related media industries (recorded music, television, Internet), as well as the growth of satellite delivery systems, set the stage for transnational deployment of increasingly ‘branded’ radio services. Although linguistic diversity and national regulatory policies continued to pose obstacles, regional radio integration was feasible in a few linguistically and economically unified regions (e.g., the Southern Cone of Latin America and the European Economic Community).

In contrast, the last decade of the twentieth century was also a boom period for decentralized community-based radio broadcasting. Community broadcasting, which emphasized community control and participation, was nurtured by democratization movements around the globe. The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) provided a venue for the organization and promotion of community radio and lobbied for ‘social enterprise’ broadcasting as a means of encouraging economically viable community stations. Just such a model of community radio was initiated in South Africa in the second half of the 1990s, where nonprofit community broadcasters were allowed to support themselves through advertising. These community stations, some of which served populations of over 50,000, provided local service where none had existed before and covered events such as the local Truth and Reconciliation Hearings. By 2000, despite the vocal protests of the commercial broadcasting industry, even the United States Federal Communication Commission had approved noncommercial low-power FM broadcasting at the community level.

3. The Future Of Radio Broadcasting

Radio’s future is likely to unfold along two quite different paths in the early twenty-first century. First, radio’s flexibility as a real-time, sound-only medium will ensure its survival as a social medium of broadcasting. Radio will continue to accompany people while they drive cars, work, and do other activities that require visual attention and mobility. Radio’s flexibility and low cost will continue to drive the proliferation of small, decentralized stations at the local level. In less developed regions of the world this form of traditional radio broadcasting will continue to be a viable medium for development by commercial, governmental, and nonprofit groups.

Second, radio will tend to merge with other digital media. Both industrial conglomeration and technological convergence will work to collapse the distinction between radio, television, and Internet. This will occur primarily in advanced capitalist countries where radio will be integrated into multimedia formats that can be delivered via satellite, cable, and mobile radio telephony to privatized consumers. At the same time, a real-time ’radio’ style of mass intimacy and anonymous interactivity will continue to shape electronic media and their contradictory relationship to modern life.

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