Radio And Society

This book maps, describes and further explores all contemporary forms of interaction between radio and its public, with a specific focus on those forms of content co-creation that link producers and listeners. Each essay will analyze one or more case studies, piecing together a map of emerging co-creation practices in contemporary radio. Contributors describe the rise of a new class of radio listeners: the networked ones. Networked audiences are made up of listeners that are not only able to produce written and audio content for radio and co-create along with the radio producers (even definitively bypassing the central hub of the radio station, by making podcasts), but that also produce social data, calling for an alternative rating system, which is less focused on attention and more on other sources, such as engagement, sentiment, affection, reputation, and influence. What are the economic and political consequences of this paradigm shift? How are radio audiences perceived by radio producers in this new radioscape? What’s the true value of radio audiences in this new frame? How do radio audiences take part in the radio flow in this age? Are audiences’ interactions and co-creations overrated or underrated by radio producers? To what extent listeners' generated content can be considered a form of participation or "free labour" exploitation? What’s the role of community radio in this new context? These are some of the many issues that this book aims to explore. Visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Radio-Audience-and-Participation-in-the-Age-of-Network-Society/869169869799842 for the book's Facebook page.

Radio is the original mass electronic medium and it continues to be critical for audiences wanting news, information, music and entertainment. For over a century enthusiasts, scholars, practitioners, governments, businesses and listeners have developed and influenced radio, making it a fascinating medium to explore today. There is still no mass medium as ubiquitous as radio and the Internet has extended its geographical and temporal reach even further. Radio remains a key media form and technology, not only surviving the challenges of the screen and digital ages, but developing despite and because of them. This book is a collection of contemporary research by radio scholars from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It explores different aspects of this both simple and complex medium, from early radio histories to the contemporary developments of radio on the Internet. Chapters engage with critical debates about the role of government, business and communities in how radio is used in our societies. Some chapters provide important new insights into making radio, and radio as a cultural force. Other chapters explore developments in research methodologies that enable deeper insights into contemporary radio and its audiences. This book provides a range of platforms for engaging with radio and radio research as a rich, vibrant and fruitful way to further our understandings of the media and ultimately, ourselves.

In 1964, rebel radio stations took to the seas in converted ships to offer listening choice to a young, resistant audience, against a backdrop of restrictive broadcasting policies. This book draws on this exceptional moment in social history, and the decades that followed, teasing out the relations between sound, society and space that were central to ‘pirate’ broadcasting activities. With a turn towards mediated life in geography, studies of radio have been largely absent. However, radio remains the most pervasive mass communications medium. This book breaks new ground, discussing in depth the relationship between radio, space and society; considering how space matters in the production, consumption and regulation of audio transmission, through the geophysical spaces of sea, land and air. It is relevant for readers interested in geographies of media, sensory spatial experience, everyday geopolitics and the turn towards elemental and more-than-human geographies.

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.

American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. Today digital media challenge the printed word. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways Americans received the news. Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of U.S. media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics. Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.

This book explores the state of community radio, a significant independent media movement that began about two decades ago, in different parts of South Asia. The volume outlines the socioeconomic and historical contexts for understanding the evolution and functioning of community radio in an increasingly globalised media environment. It provides a ring-side view of how various countries in South Asia have formulated policies that enabled the emergence of this third sector of broadcasting (public and private being the other two) through radio, rendering the media ecology in the region more pluralistic and diverse. The chapters in the volume, interspersed by practitioner perspectives, discuss a range of key issues related to community radio: radio policies, NGOisation of community radio, spectrum management and democratisation of technology, disasters/emergencies, gender issues, sustainability, and conflicts. One of the first of its kind, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers of community media and independent media studies, cultural studies, as well as sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

This book maps, describes and further explores all contemporary forms of interaction between radio and its public, with a specific focus on those forms of content co-creation that link producers and listeners. Each essay will analyze one or more case studies, piecing together a map of emerging co-creation practices in contemporary radio. Contributors describe the rise of a new class of radio listeners: the networked ones. Networked audiences are made up of listeners that are not only able to produce written and audio content for radio and co-create along with the radio producers (even definitively bypassing the central hub of the radio station, by making podcasts), but that also produce social data, calling for an alternative rating system, which is less focused on attention and more on other sources, such as engagement, sentiment, affection, reputation, and influence. What are the economic and political consequences of this paradigm shift? How are radio audiences perceived by radio producers in this new radioscape? What's the true value of radio audiences in this new frame? How do radio audiences take part in the radio flow in this age? Are audiences' interactions and co-creations overrated or underrated by radio producers? To what extent listeners' generated content can be considered a form of participation or "free labour" exploitation? What's the role of community radio in this new context? These are some of the many issues that this book aims to explore. Visit https: //www.facebook.com/pages/Radio-Audience-and-Participation-in-the-Age-of-Network-Society/869169869799842 for the book's Facebook page.