Radio in the Digital Age E-Book

Andrew Dubber

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Radio’s influence can be found in almost every corner of new media. Radio in the Digital Age assesses a medium that has not only survived the challenges of a new technological age but indeed has extended its reach. This is not a book about digital radio, but rather about the medium of radio in its many analogue and digital forms in an age characterised by digital technologies. The context of the digital age reveals new insights about the nature of radio.

In this important addition to the world of radio scholarship, Dubber provides a theoretical framework for understanding the medium - allowing for complexity and contradiction, while avoiding essentialism and technological determinism. Introducing radio as a series of practices and phenomena that can be understood through a range of discursive categories, this book explores the relationships between radio, music, politics, storytelling and society in a new and thoughtful way.

This book will make essential reading for students of media, communication, broadcasting and the digital industries. It offers a timely and comprehensive introduction for anyone who wishes to understand the role of radio in today’s media landscape.

Leseprobe

Radio in the Digital Age

Digital Media and Society Series

Nancy Baym: Personal Connections in the Digital Age

Jean Burgess and Joshua Green: YouTube

Mark Deuze: Media Work

Andrew Dubber: Radio in the Digital Age

Charles Ess: Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition

Alexander Halavais: Search Engine Society

Graeme Kirkpatrick: Computer Games and the Social Imaginary

Martin Hand: Ubiquitous Photography

Robert Hassan: The Information Society

Tim Jordan: Hacking

Leah A. Lievrouw: Alternative and Activist New Media

Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner: Mobile Communication

Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan: Digital War Reporting

Dhiraj Murthy: Twitter

Zizi A. Papacharissi: A Private Sphere

Jill Walker Rettberg: Blogging, 2nd edition

Patrik Wikström: The Music Industry, 2nd edition

Radio in the Digital Age

ANDREW DUBBER

polity

Copyright © Andrew Dubber 2013

The right of Andrew Dubber to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-8112-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1  What is Radio?

2  Radio in the Digital Landscape

3  Radio and Everyday Life

4  The Sound of Music

5  Stories in the Air

6  Radio and Technology

7  Radio in Society

8  Don’t Touch That Dial (What Dial?)

References

Index

Acknowledgements

In a way, I’ve been writing this book for over 20 years. It’s only the typing of it that has happened in the last 12 months. Over those two decades, many people have shaped my thoughts about radio, about the meanings of shifts in technological environments and about how to codify and explain my ideas about them. To single those people out here and explain why each was so important to me would cause the Acknowledgements to exceed the length of the book. Some of those people provided mentorship (whether they knew it or not), others ideas, practical assistance and expert advice. Others have written the words that I quote and refer to in this work, without which I would not be able to think what I think. More have provided the incredibly professional services that have turned my rough manuscript into the polished and finished work you hold in your hands. Still more provided me with the support, indulgence and space I needed to finish this book to a deadline that happened to coincide with some rather significant events in my life.

I’m incredibly grateful to them all, especially to those I’m proud to call my friends and my family, who didn’t just make this book possible, but also gave me the best reasons to write it – and even better ones to finish it.

Naturally, I want to thank everyone – but I’ll make sure to do so in person. Repeatedly.

However, there is one person I can’t thank in person, and so wish to do so publicly.

This book is dedicated to the late John Haynes, who not only introduced me to the phenomenon of the ‘thinking radio practitioner’, but also provided me with the best example I have ever encountered. John took me under his wing at the beginning of my career and showed me that radio, technology, culture and the human mind were all things worthy of close and thoughtful examination. He planted all of the seeds. This book is just one season’s crop.

Abbreviations

AAC

advanced audio coding

A&R

artists and repertoire

ADAT

Alesis Digital Audio Tape

AM

amplitude modulation

API

application programming interface

CB radio

Citizen Band radio

CEG

Consumer Expert Group

CHR

Contemporary Hit Radio

DAB

digital audio broadcasting

DAT

digital audio tape

DAW

digital audio workstation

EBU

European Broadcasting Union

FCC

Federal Communications Commission

FM

frequency modulation

FTP

File Transfer Protocol

IBOC

in-band, on-channel

IP

Internet Protocol

IRC

Internet Relay Chat

ISDN

Integrated Services Digital Network

kHz

kilohertz

LDBK

Laid Back Radio

LPFM

low-power FM

MB

megabyte

MED

Ministry for Economic Development (now Ministry of Business)

NAB

National Association of Broadcasters

NRK

Norsk rikskringkasting

OfCom

Office of Communications

PCM

pulse code modulator

PRS

Performing Rights Society

PRX

Public Radio Exchange

R&D

research and development

RAJAR

Radio Joint Audience Research

RBDS

Radio Broadcast Data System

RCA

Radio Corporation of America

RCS

Radio Computing Services

RDS

radio data system

RIAA

Recording Industry Association of America

RSS

Rich Site Summary

SD

Secure Digital

SMS

Short Message Service

TB

terabyte

UGC

user-generated content

USB

Universal Serial Bus

VHS

Video Home System

VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol

XML

Extensible Markup Language

CHAPTER ONE

What is Radio?

So much has changed in radio since I started. You know, the whole technological revolution that’s gone on. I remember doing a show with Steve Lamacq in the early days and the title was ‘What is the Internet?’ and there will be archive of us somewhere going ‘Just explain how this works then? What? Really?’ and we must sound incredibly stupid and naïve, but then everybody was – we all were. When I started broadcasting, you got letters from people. That was the way they communicated. And you spoke to your audience. Now there are just so many different ways of people communicating with you. It’s constant. It’s this barrage. And it’s a two-way street. They’re texting you, you’re texting them, you’re tweeting them, they’re tweeting you, it’s Facebook, it’s everything. There are cameras in the radio studios. When I went into radio I was fairly shy. I used to embrace the time you could go in and you could just wear a tracksuit and no makeup and that was great. But now you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, actually, there’s a camera there and you have to put a bit of makeup on.’ So it’s just such a different medium. But at the same time … it’s you and it’s a microphone and it’s somebody listening, wherever they are around the world. So radio, I think, still essentially remains the same.

Jo Whiley (interviewed on Paul Gambaccini’s ‘Music in the Air: History of Music Radio’, BBC Radio 2, episode 6 of 6, first broadcast 18 December 2012)

Introduction

Before I became a radio academic I was a radio practitioner; and so, like many people who study and write about radio, I draw upon both sets of professional experiences. The benefit of this is that it ensures our analyses are influenced and informed by both our experience of the ‘real world’ of radio and our arms-length academic research. However, it also presents the danger that we will start our study with some (so-called) truisms about radio that have not been tested through intellectual rigour or painstaking analysis, but that have instead been arrived at through the discourse of pragmatic and routine practices. In other words, there are many things about radio that have come through the academic tradition and reside within the canon of radio studies literature, but that have their origin in things that are simply ‘known’ or ‘obvious’ to radio practitioners.

It is important, then, that I recognise that my own understanding of radio, like that of many radio academics, originates very much in the world of practice; in the discourse of radio professionals; in the day-to-day experience of making, presenting and producing radio programmes, programming music formats, writing and recording commercial copy. I am, perhaps, an entirely typical radio academic in this respect: I try to draw upon my previous professional background as well as my ongoing involvement in radio today.

It is perhaps also important to start with some reflection on how we come to study radio, because this ensures that we do not forget that the understanding we have of radio, of media, of technology and of society is a personal and cultural understanding, and not simply an accumulation of objective facts. It is filtered through a veil of life experiences, moments of personal profoundness, and the unique set of baggage and contextual frames we bring to bear on the object of analysis. In short, we can never quite become the dispassionate and aloof intellectuals who observe and interrogate a subject while bringing nothing to bear on that observation themselves. I am instead persuaded by the anthropological tradition of analysis, which attempts to give a voice to the objects of analysis themselves, to get out of the way as much as possible, but also to admit to the undeniable fact that the storyteller cannot but shape the narrative. It is with this in mind that I introduce myself in what, in another context, might seem an unnecessarily comprehensive and personal manner. With that in mind, I hope the reader will indulge the following personal history, in the hopes that it might add context and coherence to the content of this book.

Geographically speaking, I grew up and lived a significant proportion of my life in Auckland, New Zealand, but it seems to me that it was, in large part, radio that provided the environment within which that life took place. It wasn’t time to walk to primary school until Merv Smith had chatted to MacHairy the Scottish spider just after the 8 o’clock news on 1ZB (1080 kHz on the AM band) and when I got there, if we were lucky, it was a day on which the ‘Programmes for Schools’ were broadcast, and we were given the opportunity to listen to stories as well as sing and clap, along with New Zealand children all over the country, led by the radio presenters and guided by our ‘Programmes for Schools’ workbooks.

Each year, my family would go on holiday to a beach house at Stanmore Bay in Whangaparoa, and I’d always be secretly pleased when it was too wet to go to the seaside because, over the Christmas and New Year summer break, the National Programme on Radio 1YA would play old episodes of BBC radio comedies like The Navy Lark, Dad’s Army, Round the Horne, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and The Goons. I learned to play cribbage while laughing at Eccles and Bluebottle in a small, slopey-floored wooden house by the sea, as the rain came down outside. And at the end of our vacation, on the way home each year, we listened to Casey Kasem’s syndicated American Top 40 year-end chart show on the car radio. I have a particularly strong memory of it having been a close-run thing, that one year, between Andy Gibb’s ‘Shadow Dancing’ (which I loved) and Meco’s disco version of the ‘Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band’ (which my 11-year-old tastes interpreted as innovative, engagingly derivative, but essentially problematic in terms of authenticity); and the revelation of the top spot on the US hit parade was a source of tremendous anticipation and excitement. Of course, now that I come to research and refresh these memories, Google assures me that this never actually happened – and that those two songs weren’t even in the charts in the same year. We should not perhaps be surprised by this, memory being a construction and a narrative that we use to make sense of our worlds. It’s a ‘truth’ rather than something that is strictly factual. However, the fact that we do this is significant in the context of this book, and it’s important to bear in mind right upfront that perception and understanding are malleable, mutable and contingent phenomena that may or may not be strictly related to the ontological reality of things.

Throughout the rest of the year, every Sunday morning, I’d listen as Don Linden played audio stories from a deep archive of primarily American children’s records that included Molly Whuppie, Gerald McBoingBoing, Sparky and the Talking Train, Flick the Fire Engine, Little Toot, Gossamer Wump and (the British contribution) Spike Milligan’s Badjelly the Witch, a musical story written and performed by Milligan, which – like the song ‘Snoopy’s Christmas’, which has dominated the airwaves in December in New Zealand since the year I was born – is inexplicably little known in its UK home. It was engrossing, it fired the imagination – and the way I remember it, it was pretty much at the centre of my childhood. In fact, arguably, radio and music have been what I’ve hung most of my memories off – real or imagined. That makes it pretty powerful stuff, in my experience – which, let’s not forget, is what this is.

And then, after a while, I discovered another setting on my grandparents’ portable transistor radio receiver: shortwave. There, among all the static, if you held the aerial just right, were distant voices, strange music and people talking to each other in foreign languages. It’s a cliché, of course, to say that I was ‘transported’, but I don’t really know another way to describe that feeling, sitting on the front porch, hearing for the first time just how big the rest of the world was.

In my early teens I was a fan of rock music stations Radio Hauraki and 1251ZM (as it was known then) in equal measure. I knew the names of all of the presenters, and I even wrote a letter once to Hauraki, offering ideas for competitions. The music was, of course, central to all this. Radio was my main source of music listening. My parents had records at home, but I was quick to figure out that Roger Whittaker, Andy Williams and Helen Reddy didn’t speak to me or for me, and so radio provided access to what, I imagined, represented me and connected me to a set of likeminded peers.

My radio listening grew to levels of active fandom, to the extent that I believed that I had figured out the playlist rotates to a high degree of accuracy; and I believed that I could reasonably confidently predict when, for instance, the B52s song ‘Rock Lobster’ would turn up again. Of course, I didn’t know they were called ‘rotates’, or even that there was such a thing as a playlist – but I could tell that the presenters obviously liked some of the same records that I liked, and they seemed to play those records with predictable regularity. And even if my predictions were off (and they often were), I was content that, given that we shared such a bond of musical tastes – with only a few inexplicable deviations here and there – they were bound to play my favourite songs sooner rather than later.

The first album I ever chose for myself in a record shop was paid for by a voucher won in a phone-in competition. I selected David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album – but I must have spent a good half hour torn between that and Donna Summer’s The Wanderer, while my father waited in the aisles of Jim’s Record Spot in Panmure as I made what I knew to be a critical decision in my life of music fandom. Around that same time, there was a late (way past my bedtime) Sunday night programme on 1ZM, which, as I recall, was essentially about the apocalypse. It was part documentary, part speculative fiction, and partly an excuse to string a bunch of different songs together in an interesting way. The programme, the name of which is lost to memory, related all the ways in which we were likely to die imminently, collectively and absolutely as a species. Of course, I listened under the covers with a transistor radio and a terribly unreliable flashlight, as kids do. The programme featured all the popular nuclear paranoia of the time, as well as a lot of terrifying scenarios from religion and mythology. I remember vividly that the development of barcodes as a techno-cultural phenomenon was cited as evidence of something in the Book of Revelations; the Cold War was at its height, a planet-obliterating World War 3 was an historical inevitability and we were only ‘Minutes to Midnight’ on the Doomsday clock. Moreover – if you counted the number of letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name, you got 666. These chilling facts and coincidences were presented in such a way as to provide a compelling reason to play the song ‘Games without Frontiers’ by Peter Gabriel to an already emotionally heightened teen audience. That series provided not only my first hearing of that and some other songs I love to this day, but also the occasion of starting to piece together the fact that songs could have meaning beyond ‘Boy meets girl, and then they dance’. Songs conveyed meaning; they carried stories; referred to important issues; underlined emotional impact; soundtracked personal, emotional, political and symbolic worlds.

Meanwhile, Radio Hauraki released a compilation album called Homegrown, which celebrated new, independent local music. Local music on radio was, and remains, something of a contentious issue in broadcast music radio the world over, but it has a particular resonance in New Zealand because of some unique characteristics of the popular music industries and the dominance of Anglo-American popular music in a primarily English-speaking, post-colonial nation. Importantly, the radio station not only recorded and released independent local music, it actually playlisted those tracks on air, and (naturally) the more I heard them, the more of a fan I was of those artists and those songs. Partially as a result of that short and rather unusual episode in New Zealand radio history, it has always seemed to me self-evident that radio stations can play songs to make them popular – not simply because they’re popular. Something that was great, influential and powerful about that Homegrown album, of course, was the idea that, in order to be a musician – or to put out a record – you didn’t have to be as international and enigmatic as David Bowie, nor as glamorous and funky as Donna Summer. Not that New Zealand records hadn’t existed before 1980 – just that I’d never really noticed that they were New Zealand records. Jon Stevens, Mark Williams, Sharon O’Neill and Split Enz were just pop stars, and so separate from my reality that their New Zealandness pretty much entirely escaped me until my early teens. There was local music, of course – but then there was radio music. Music has always been centrally important to me, and radio was the method through which I arrived at my appreciation for music of all stripes. British listeners had John Peel. We had Barry Jenkin: Doctor Rock.

In 1981 – just a couple of years after it originally debuted on BBC radio in the UK – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on the National Programme via the YA stations around the country (1YA in Auckland). And my cassette recorder was put to good use making sure I didn’t miss a moment of it. Not just for me, but for my generation of radio, storytelling and comedy enthusiasts, Douglas Adams had created a masterpiece of its medium. And, while the story is still broadly revered, it’s often forgotten that this was a radio programme that only later became a series of books, a television series, and a feature film. For me, though, almost better than the radio series were the records that used essentially the same scripts, almost all of the same actors, most of the same sound effects, and (it seemed) just a little more care and attention when it came to the direction and sound design. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was radio for the airwaves, and then it was radio for release on records. This slight mutation in mediation factored in the realities of its context. It was considered in terms of its medium-appropriateness and specificity, which, as will become apparent, is something I deem to be a tremendously important consideration, to the extent that the translation from one medium to another is something that I believe The Hitchhiker’s Guide did more successfully than anything that came before it, and more than most of what has come since. Again, you’ll bear in mind that this is an entirely personal perspective, and not in any way a statement of fact. I listened to those records and my cassettes of the radio series so often, I can still, to this day, recite the first half-hour episode verbatim, from memory, start to finish. The theme tune to The Hitchhiker’s Guide still sends shivers up my spine whenever I hear it.

I guess it was unsurprising, then, that I ended up in radio. In fact, long before radio initiated my academic career, it first ruined it. Rather than attend my undergraduate classes in English literature, art history and music theory at the University of Auckland, I went straight up to student radio station bFM and tried to find ways in which I could be involved. I could think of no finer reason to be in an institute of higher education than to sit in a studio, play records and talk into a microphone.

I will spare you the detail of my progression through student radio, to an unpaid apprenticeship in the studios at 91FM and Radio Hauraki; of my helping set up the short-lived (and almost comically doomed) Manukau City radio station Oasis 94FM; bluffing my way into a job making ads for Radio Pacific for about five years; researching, writing and producing my first radio documentary series in 1994 (a 26-part, 1-hour a week programme about the history of jazz that nearly killed me); setting up my own radio production company making radio drama series, jazz programmes and other syndicated shows; hosting a nationwide specialist music radio show; creating children’s radio programmes; making documentaries; starting the NZ Radio email discussion list; instigating the Auckland Society of Low Power FM Broadcasters; and lobbying for a New Zealand children’s radio station. But I’m not going to do that, because I’m not writing my memoirs here, and the point of this story has been made, I think.

And that point is this: I love radio. Radio is, in large measure, who I am.

It’s important – both to me personally and, more significantly, for a proper understanding of this book – that you realise the full meaning of that fact, because without really understanding how significant radio is as a defining cultural force and as a central part of my life – not just of my career – I think what I have to say would probably have a good deal less impact, and less significance. In fact there’d almost be very little point in me saying it, and almost nothing at stake.

But even more consequential than the enthusiasm I have for the medium and its legacy is the caveat I mentioned right at the outset: I am putting my hand up to admit to a degree of advocacy for radio, as well as to being immersed within both the fandom and the professional practice cultures of radio broadcasting. As a result, my understandings of the medium are coloured by an immersion that necessarily sets some factors as ‘common sense’ or as ‘what is obvious’, and, while I will endeavour to make strange some of these very familiar concepts and taken-for-granted premises so that we will be able to distance ourselves from them and critically observe them in as objective a manner as we can, there will, I expect, be some traces of essentialism, some residue of that immersion and some unavoidable perception bias within the work. My ambition, however, is to declare this potential problem upfront and to alert you to its possibility, so that you will be able to identify that phenomenon not only within this text, but also within other texts in the radio studies tradition.

Where to Start

One of the problems one often experiences with any analysis of radio as a broad subject area – and perhaps this problem can be said to exist across the entire body of academic work known as the field of radio studies – is an underlying assumption about an agreement concerning what is meant by the word ‘radio’ itself. If one looks through the literature of the field or peruses back issues of The Radio Journal, topics such as government broadcasting policy, industrial practice, documentary programme making, music programming, representation and identity, community and the public sphere, textual analysis and technical management of the electromagnetic spectrum all feature. While these topics may be broadly related and connected by the idea of a shared (though contested) understanding of what radio is as a cultural institution and technological form, that idea perpetually sidesteps the question of definition. And while, in the main, definitions are problematic, leading one perhaps to conclude that the best course of action would ordinarily be to work from this assumed (albeit vaguely stated) starting point, there is now the problem of a shifting context. In a larger and broadly static media environment that includes a range of electric media forms (television, the telephone, recorded music, and so on), some lack of clarity about the edges of radio is tolerable, because as an object of study, radio tends to hold still as we examine a particular component. However, as part of a changing media environment, radio becomes a moving target. The edges blur – and so it begins to seem more important to ascertain (or at least attempt to clarify) exactly what is and what isn’t radio. Something is happening to radio – indeed something has happened to radio – and in order for us to understand what has changed about it and what that means, we need to stop and attempt to gain some clarity about what ‘radio’ was in the first place. And it is, I would assert, only when one attempts to step outside of one’s own experience of, advocacy for, and immersion within a particular manifestation of that media form that it is possible to identify and dispassionately track changes in its technological and societal context. This book is an attempt to achieve that goal, and my own personal frame is something that I rely on you, the reader, to help me keep out of this work. I am not the subject of this book. None of us is. And, more importantly, I plan to argue that none of the things we hold dear and like to call radio is what is at stake within this work. As uncomfortable and counter-intuitive as this may appear, what we like to think of as radio is not radio. In fact, in a very important sense, radio may not, in fact, even exist.

Kate Lacey (2008: 22) has already posited this provocative thought:

there is no such thing as ‘radio’, and yet there is still valuable work for radio studies to do. Or to put it another way, it is the very idea of radio with which radio studies need to engage to connect with debates beyond the confines of radio studies.

The idea of radio being a non-existent medium may seem, at face value, patently absurd, but it is no more absurd than the idea that what we personally have experienced as radio is what radio is, in any meaningful form. Lacey’s assertion that we need to explore radio’s ‘porous and shifting boundaries’ is well made, and it is taken very seriously within the context of this book. But, all the same, an analysis of radio in the digital age appears to demand, at the very least, a clear starting point. We understand that the phenomenon we refer to as radio is clearly not restricted to one’s own, personal experience of radio. It is clear that radio is an entity that can remain consistent enough to be discussed as a discrete object of analysis that shifts between media environments, much as a dumpling with porous edges may be transferred from one soup to another and remain a dumpling. And so we remain confronted with the question: What, in fact, is radio?

Essentialism and Epistemology

A book entitled Understanding Radio (Crisell 1986) seems a sensible place to start looking for our answers. It opens with the following assertion: ‘What strikes everyone, broadcasters and listeners alike, as significant about radio is that it is a blind medium.’ Crisell goes on to explain that he means we can only hear rather than see its messages – and not (of course) that the medium itself cannot see. But, leaving aside the question of ‘blindness’ for a moment, consider instead the totalising ‘what strikes everyone’.

In fact radio is such a different experience for people – at different times, within different contexts, and depending on what it is they are actually paying attention to – that ‘what strikes them’ may in fact vary greatly. What appears to be significant to the individual observer of radio is not universally shared. Both ontologically and phenomenologically, radio is a complex and multifaceted entity and set of experiences. An assumption of a universally shared impression of radio seems to me to be a deeply problematic place to begin. However, the greater problem is one of essentialism, and it is one that I go to great lengths to avoid (if not entirely erase) in this book.

Radio need not necessarily mean a particular type of audio content consisting of some combination of speech, music and sound effects, coming from a particular type of device. That is common, perhaps, but it is not an essential characteristic of the medium. Other authors have ventured that the central or defining characteristic of radio is that it’s personal – or that it’s a secondary medium, which is to say we don’t so much listen to it as have it on while we do other things. Berland (1990) notes this apparently commonly agreed characteristic and identifies it as having developed as a commercial strategy rather than as an inherent quality of the medium:

Radio is commonly referred to as a ‘secondary medium’ in the broadcasting industry. The phrase conveys the industry’s pragmatic view that no one cares whether you listen to radio so long as you do not turn it off.

And, while it is easy enough to find this philosophy repeated in the corridors of certain types of radio stations by certain types – or pay grades – of staff members (assuming that they are situated within a particular political economic context, at particular periods in recent history, in a specific cultural or geographic territory), you will not have to look hard to find someone who will assert the opposite. Radio is just as likely to be ‘compelling’ as it is to be ‘wallpaper’. The condition of ‘secondariness’ is not a prerequisite for a medium, phenomenon or practice to be considered radio. It’s perhaps a useful and descriptive idea in some instances that have been selected for examination and analysis, but it is far from being an essential characteristic; nor is it by any means always true of every experience or instance of radio.

The epistemology of radio is therefore an interesting territory to explore: that is, what do we actually know about radio, how is that knowledge acquired and to what extent can we really understand it as a medium? It’s easy enough to coin (and uncritically repeat) these pithy ‘radio is …’ phrases – and they can be useful in the sense that, intuitively, people often do know what you’re talking about. However, it is also the case that what we mean when we say ‘radio’ is often left unclear, or is the subject of assumption. We may be referring to radio as an institution; or as a method of transmission; or as a professional practice; or as waves in the electromagnetic spectrum; or as a physical item that sits on the kitchen bench or car dashboard; or as a type of programme that one happens to be listening to.

Radio consists of shows, stations, schedules, studios, managers, sales reps, presenters, producers and technicians. It includes and connects with political economies, legislation, a broad range of technologies, the physical properties of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum (and our ability to harness those waveforms), promotional cultures, music industry integration, local and regional as well as national characteristics and manifestations, brands, celebrities, real people’s lives (audiences, interviewees and radio workers alike) and – importantly – other media. It is different in different places, at different times, and within different contexts. More importantly, it is often different from one instance to another, even within the precise same geographic locale, legal framework, political climate and period in history.

What strikes this author about radio is not its blindness, but rather its connection with people’s lives, with history, with technological development, with jobs that people do in the industry, with programmes: drama, music, documentary, magazine, commentary, news, entertainment and other genres – with popular culture and with a shared understanding of our society and how it works. And, importantly, those things – all of those things – change over time and in response to environmental, cultural, technological, legislative and social shifts.

And yet not one of those things is essential to radio. Radio can exist without music. It can exist in a completely different legislative environment. It can (and does) exist without the use of radio waves. It can exist outside of the context of brands and stations. It need be neither personal nor secondary. These might be commonplace conventions, but they are not necessary characteristics in order for what we call ‘radio’ to be radio.

David Black (2001: 398) encounters this problem in his analysis of internet radio and comes to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that radio is best defined simply as that which people agree to call radio:

Listeners have a lot to do with it. A medium’s identity stems in part from how it is received and treated by its users. Listeners may of course be nudged in this or that direction by the industry. But if, for whatever reason, Internet audio is treated as if it were radio, then to some irreducible extent it is radio.

Stephen Lax (2011: 152) points to the problem of measurement within this shifting environment. In order for it to be ascertained how many people are listening to radio via digital means, an agreement must first be reached as to what is considered to fall within the realm of radio and what is considered to fall outside of it:

[The CEG] recommended that ‘digital listening’ in this instance should mean listening to DAB radio, rather than including all digital platforms. This would compare like with like since DAB, as a terrestrial broadcast system, was a direct replacement for FM radio. Like FM, therefore, it was portable, whereas listening through a television or on the Internet was a different kind of experience, and did not incorporate the essence of radio, its mobility. Research conducted for the BBC Trust supported the importance of radio’s portability being a key defining characteristic.

The arbitrariness of the decision that, in order to be considered radio, something must first be ‘portable’ is palpable within the text, but the need to draw lines around a medium in order to develop useful statistics for business intelligence and to inform policy-making speaks to this compulsion to insist on the medium having some essential characteristic, whether that might be portability, secondariness, transmission via electromagnetic spectrum or, indeed, blindness.

My colleague Tim Wall, currently editor of The Radio Journal, navigates this problem of definition by talking about radio as ‘a series of discursive practices’, which is a suitably vague but generally comprehensive strategy that works as a shorthand to discuss – but not attempt to solve – this complexity; to open up discussion rather than to provide neat answers. I borrow this approach as a leaping-off point towards a richer understanding of radio, so that we may examine the phenomenon and experience of radio in the digital age. However, while I find the notion of media as forms of discourse helpful in terms of its flexibility and a more satisfying alternative to essentialism, I also find myself frustrated by its reluctance to arrive at a conclusion. If radio is, as Black suggests above, whatever people say it is, then theoretically radio can be almost anything. My contention is that radio is something specific, but that its specificity is to be located by examining the consistencies that are present within those changing discursive practices that surround it, rather than by declaring it to have some essential characteristics on the one hand, and by allowing any interpretation as acceptable (‘if that’s what you want to call radio, then fine’) on the other.

My aim in this book is to examine the nature of these discursive practices and find common threads as well as consistent and coherent ways of talking about what radio is and what it means, so that we may have some clarity and agreement – if not in fact certainty – about what radio is. In so doing, it will be possible to analyse and draw conclusions about the ways in which this medium, its manifestations, and the discourse that surrounds it have changed or have different meanings in a media environment characterised by a predominance of ‘digital’ technology rather than by a predominance of ‘electric’ technology.

This is what I mean by the title of this book. It is not about the digitalisation of radio broadcasting or about the development of digital broadcasting platforms, though of course those will be important issues to discuss as part of this narrative. Nor is it about podcasting, online music services, timeshifting, or iPods, though – again – these are both relevant and interesting. This is not a book about digital radio.

This book is about radio – and everything radio means – in an age that is characterised by digital media. There are some entirely analogue radio practices and forms that persist in the digital age, and these are as worthy of our attention as those that employ new and cutting-edge technologies. So in order to attempt an analysis of radio in the digital age, it is important at least to attempt to arrive first at some clarity, if not fixed definitions, about what is meant by those terms: ‘radio’ and ‘digital age’.

Discursive Categorisation

As I have mentioned above, the phenomenon that we call radio changes from place to place, in different legislative and cultural contexts, as well as over time. So to draw a direct line from the early development of the point-to-point ‘wireless telegraphy’ experiments of Marconi to contemporary DAB broadcasts, podcasting, mp3 streams and Last.fm requires a number of quite significant imaginative leaps. In order to be able to claim continuity of any kind, it would seem that a technologically deterministic narrative that posits strong cause and effect between different developmental eras of radio is necessary – and, while these connections are often assumed (unstated, but present) as direct causal linkages within the body of radio studies literature, this is not necessarily a desirable or a helpful conclusion to reach. However, neither is an argument in favour of distinctive breaks, in which technologies are ‘revolutionised’ at significant points of innovation throughout the medium’s history. This discontinuity theory of media development usually favours a narrative that highlights a particular agency, often that of a great person or ‘genius’ who discovers, invents or reconstitutes the medium in some new form. In fact the reality is necessarily more complex, and a comparison between the phenomena of radio at different points in history (for example, 1927, 1967 and 2007) must factor in the observation that, even at a specific given point in time (say, in 1927), radio existed in different forms, in different places, to serve different needs, and for different political, social, economic and cultural reasons.

In an attempt to solve this dilemma – the fact that we can neither claim continuity nor distinctive breaks – I propose that radio does not actually have any essential characteristics – not even that it favours audio over visual communication. And, while it is likely that most forms of radio that we will ever encounter probably will have a primarily audio media aspect, there are other communicative media forms that we do not call radio but that also prioritise audio content (CDs, iPods, telephones, remote doorbells, bluetooth headsets …). So, instead of looking for characteristics that persist regardless of radio’s form, historical period, geography, purpose or context, I suggest that there are categories of characteristics that we can use to speak about radio across all of those different milieux, and that these categorical frames remain useful despite the changes that may occur in any aspect of radio.

To that end, I have identified the following ten categories of discursive frame that appear to remain constant throughout the development of radio over time. There may be others, and indeed readers may wish to construct their own systems of categorisation using these ten as a starting point. However, I find the following divisions useful, and I offer this method of partitioning the discourse in the hope that it contributes to a useful and workable approach to an analysis of the medium in a changing technological environment.

Device