"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.

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.

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.

Hangen traces the careers of three of the most successful Protestant radio evangelists--Paul Rader, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Charles Fuller--and examines the strategies they used to bring their messages to listeners across the nation, transforming American radio evangelism from an on-air novelty in the 1920s into a profitable and wide-reaching industry by the 1950s.

Since the rise of television, much radio consists of 'capsule' news and music formats which are heard as background to other activities. However the medium offers a great deal more. This collection of essays shows how in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and the South Pacific, radio continues to provide distinctive forms of content for the individual listener, yet also enables ethnic and cultural groups to maintain their sense of identity. Ranging from radio among the primordial communities to digital broadcasting and the internet, these essays suggest that the benefits and gratifications which radio confers remain unique and irreplaceable in this multi-media age.

The role of mass communication in nation building has often been underestimated, particularly in the case of Mexico. Following the Revolution, the Mexican government used the new medium of radio to promote national identity and build support for the new regime. Joy Hayes now tells how an emerging country became a radio nation. This groundbreaking book investigates the intersection of radio broadcasting and nation building. Hayes tells how both government-controlled and private radio stations produced programs of distinctly Mexican folk and popular music as a means of drawing the country's regions together and countering the influence of U.S. broadcasts. Hayes describes how, both during and after the period of cultural revolution, Mexican radio broadcasting was shaped by the clash and collaboration of different social forces--including U.S. interests, Mexican media entrepreneurs, state institutions, and radio audiences. She traces the evolution of Mexican radio in case studies that focus on such subjects as early government broadcasting activities, the role of Mexico City media elites, the "paternal voice" of presidential addresses, and U.S. propaganda during World War II. More than narrative history, Hayes's study provides an analytical framework for understanding the role of radio in building Mexican nationalism at a critical time in that nation's history. Radio Nation expands our appreciation of an overlooked medium that changed the course of an entire country.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.