Chignell, Hugh

English

Bournemouth University Research Online

IntroductionThis is a book about radio and the relatively new subject of radio studies.In fact, it is the first book to have the words ‘radio studies’ in its title.Radio itself has been the subject of research and writing since it wasinvented at the beginning of the last century. Much of that publishedwork concerns the technical dimension of radio, but there is also a sig-nificant body of work on, for example, radio history, on the nature ofspeech on radio, on radio drama and so on. This body of writing is fairlypuny in comparison with the literature on film and television but it isimportant nonetheless. Turning to the slightly more introspective aspectof this book, the consideration of radio studies itself, the published liter-ature is almost non-existent. Very few writers have turned their attentionto the nature of this subdivision of media or communication studies andI hope that what follows will help take a step in that direction. There are many reasons why radio has been neglected in mediastudies, at least in British academic life. Media studies was principallythe creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies atBirmingham University under their director, Stuart Hall. As Scannellexplains, ‘work in the centre explored the press, radio and television, butthe last of this trio received most attention, because it had become, inthe 1960s, the most popular everyday source of entertainment andpolitical information and debate for most British people’ (2007: 199).Some of the most influential research carried out in the centre was ontelevision, for example the study of the television programme,Nationwide and the detailed analysis of one edition of the current affairsprogramme, Panorama (Scannell, 2007: 212). Hall’s colleagues andstudents went on to dominate media studies in the UK, but as scholarsof visual media and especially television, little wonder radio was tem-porarily neglected. The state of radio studies in America appears to be alot healthier and I discuss below some of the American influences onthis book. There is a tradition of studying American radio which goesback to the pre-war era; a good example is the work of the PrincetonOffice of Radio Research which published Hadley Cantril’s study ofOrson Welles’s famous broadcast, War of the Worlds and its remarkablepublic reception. It used to be the case that books about radio would begin with arather apologetic justification for writing about the ‘neglected’ medium.introduction1Chignell-3802-Introduction:Chignell-3802-Introduction.qxp 10/10/2008 4:59 PM Page 1We lived in a visual culture, television was dominant, radio was ignoredbut should not be. It is certainly true that radio was ignored; books onthe media were often in reality books on television, the importance ofradio drama was ignored as was radio news and current affairs. ‘Themedia’ was in fact shorthand for ‘the visual media’. The situation todayis rather different. There will be no justification here for a book aboutradio because none is needed. Radio, and here I mean not just broadcastanalogue radio but digital radio, internet radio and podcasts, has asserteditself to such a degree that excuses are unnecessary. Some readers mightthink that I am stretching the term radio to include audio and indeedthe new technologies of the Internet and podcasting. I think this is split-ting hairs. No medium can be defined by the technology of its delivery:a podcast remains radio because of the way it is produced. A film, afterall, is still a film even when it is shot using a digital video camera andwatched on a television set. In writing this book I have made the rather presumptuous claim thatthere are central concepts used in radio studies. This is open to question:there is no agreed conceptual framework for a subject area in such anearly stage of development. My choice of concepts barely reflects com-mon usage but instead is an attempt to list and describe what seem to meto be some useful and often used ideas and terms. A different authorwould have produced a different selection of concepts and for that reasonI need to explain the thinking behind my own.The concepts chosen here are derived from two sources. The firstsource is the business of producing radio itself; this includes the genresand styles of programming (the phone-in, news, comedy and so on) andother central ideas and practices of the radio industry (for example theradio format, the audience, radio journalism). These are terms which areused in the radio industry itself and so have a professional currency. Thesecond source for my list comes from writing about radio from withinthe academic field of media studies, including radio studies. So, forexample, the idea that radio is an ‘intimate’ medium is a recurrenttheme in the radio studies literature, as is the ‘liveness’ of radio and theidea of the radio DJ’s ‘persona’. These are not terms, however, often usedin the radio industry but belong to the critical discourse about themedium which tries to make sense of it from the outside. In additionthere are a few concepts here which are not radio specific; the conceptof the ‘imagined community’ was not developed with radio in mind butappears in a number of books on the subject. Other examples in this cat-egory are public service broadcasting, propaganda and development andkey concepts inradio studies2Chignell-3802-Introduction:Chignell-3802-Introduction.qxp 10/10/2008 4:59 PM Page 2I would argue that adding a radio perspective to these topics adds to ourunderstanding of the media more generally. Finally, I have also addedsome concepts which have barely been written about at all but whichseem to me to be full of potential for radio studies: I have used whatmight in other circumstances be called ‘poetic licence’. There is no con-sensus about what terms like ‘radiogenic’, ‘radiocracy’ and ‘radio world’mean, but they are clearly useful concepts and I have made a rashattempt to define them and explain why they are important. My approach to writing the individual entries also needs some justifi-cation. There are two main influences here: first, my own interest inradio history; and, second, the belief that it helps our understanding ofradio to consider the British and American experience at the same time.Most of the entries include some sort of historical context whichincludes 20th-century examples if they help us to understand radiotoday. As for the use of both American and British examples and expe-riences, my reasons for this transatlantic approach are partly intellectualand partly personal. I would argue that in almost every aspect of themedium we can understand it better if we study both sides of theAtlantic. So regulation, the DJ, the localness of radio – an understandingof all of these is so much more complete if both the American and theBritish traditions are considered. These two national examples are suffi-ciently different and sufficiently similar to make comparison rewardingand, as previously mentioned, there is a strong tradition of radio schol-arship in America which has produced a significant literature. My otherreason for acknowledging the American case is that I am a member ofthe ‘baby boomer’ generation which grew up at the height of Americancultural influence on Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Kerouac, KenKesey, The Grateful Dead, these were my cultural influences and sowhen I started the research for this book I found myself turning to thetwo most important cultural histories of US radio, Michele Hilmes’sRadio Voices and Susan Douglas’s Listening In. Both of these sources,together with Christopher Sterling’s excellent Encyclopedia of Radio arewidely used here and indeed made this book possible. I should add herethe continued importance and influence of Andrew Crisell’s ground-breaking book Understanding Radio first published almost quarter of acentury ago. There are repeated references to Crisell’s book here and,like him, I have tried to write about the ‘distinctive characteristics of theradio medium’ (Crisell, 1986: xv). Radio is a remarkable subject for students and scholars alike. There issomething incurably fascinating about the oldest broadcasting medium.introduction3Chignell-3802-Introduction:Chignell-3802-Introduction.qxp 10/10/2008 4:59 PM Page 3(AQ)CommentCN1: Notin refs?Once the only form of broadcasting, then the victim of television’s success,reprieved as the natural voice of popular music and youth culture andnow on the crest of the wave of more democratic, user-generated formsof audio. Radio seems to be both ancient and modern; so yesterday andyet so tomorrow. In our visual culture, radio persists without pictures asthe ‘blind’ medium but in this invisibility it retains a special power tocommunicate. Important, even dominant, though the visual is, soundcommunication through chat, the phone, in music and on radio remainsboth different and extremely important. We no longer live in oral societieswhere all communication and knowledge was through speech, but wedo live in the age of ‘secondary orality’ (Ong, 1988) where the elec-tronic media, including radio, thrives on the immediate and intimatequalities of speech and sound. This book reflects and even celebratesradio’s unique and somehow irrepressible voice. Cross-reference to other entries in the book are emboldened.Hugh ChignellBournemouth Media School, Bournemouth UniversityAugust 2008key concepts inradio studies4Chignell-3802-Introduction:Chignell-3802-Introduction.qxp 10/10/2008 4:59 PM Page 4

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