Communication in the Radio Century

Abstract

Abstract Radio figures in this chapter as a liquid medium, forever adapting and shifting form, occupying public spaces, inhabiting individual minds, negotiating, and renegotiating the modern variability of time and space. As the quintessential pioneer of modern communications, with a century’s experience of experimentation and renewal, and as an audio medium that puts into relief many of the dominant currents of visual and digital media culture, this chapter argues that radio ought to occupy a much more prominent space in the field of communication history and theory within which it is so commonly sidelined or relegated to a historical footnote. More than simply rehearsing radio’s resilience and its continuing significance, the conceit of this chapter is to offer some ways of thinking through radio – or, rather, ideas of radio understood as expansively as possible - as a foil with which to re-contextualize contemporary media as belonging to “the radio century”.