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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

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Radio Daze: Some historical & technological aspects of radio

a
Tom O'Regan
a
Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies , Murdoch University ,
Published online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Tom O'Regan (1992) Radio Daze: Some historical & technological aspects of radio, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 6:1, 102-111

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 Tom O'Regan

RADIO DAZE

Some Historical & Technological Aspects of Radio

I want to do no more here than focus upon a number of "radio scenes"

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drawn from radio history and to recommend an interesting way of

retelling radio history through a cultural technology focus. I take my
license from Carolyn Marvin. In her provocative introduction to When Old
Technologies were New, Marvin notes how the tendency within the study of
the media is to focus upon 'artefactual histories', thereby leaving out the
social negotiations, technological interconnexions and distributive struc-
tures which lend support to the development and extention of the artefact
(4-6). Our academic organisation of knowledge about the media has been
careful to construct a boundary between the different 'media' such that
'social processes connected to media logically and historically begin with
the instrument' and such media apparently 'fashion new social groups
called audiences from voiceless collectivities and to inspire new uses based
on novel technological properties' (3-4). Marvin's analysis suggests that we
can usefully look to intermedia connexions, linkages between communica-
tion media and our other communication and transportation networks,
and technologies such as our interpersonal communication whether face
to face, or via the telephone and the fax.
Oddly enough, there is currently a peculiar consensus for embracing
"technological theories". This has been spurred along by the publication of
a collection of James Carey's essays in Communication as Culture - and even
recent comments by Elihu Katz - perhaps best known as co-author with
Paul Lazarsfeld of Personal Influence in 1955. Here is Katz writing in 1987:

technological theories, often discredited for their crude deter-

minism, deserve our reconsideration in the search for power-
ful effects. Compared with the more common theories of

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 Continuum 6:1 (1992) 0 'Regan

media effects, technological theories are characterised by

their emphasis (1) on how we think, rather than what we
think, that is, on the ways in which our mental processing of
different media give rise to different styles of thought; (2) on
information and its diffusion rather than on influence; (3) on
boundary-setting for social systems such as empires, nations,
churches - sometimes in concert, sometimes in conflict, with
agencies of established power.

Katz goes on to encourage the study of the 'careers' of media technologies.

As part of such a study he recommends consideration of 'the struggles they
engender in the effort to harness them, now for one cause or one class, now
for another7. Far from it being a matter of 'established power' simply
coopting the different media, 'revolutions' are the result of such struggles.
Such a study calls for ways of classifying media:
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some as point-to-point, others as broadcast technologies;

some as media that "segment" societies and others as media
that "integrate" them; some that inform, others that influence.
It raises the question of whether media have "immanent"
tendencies to perform one function or another, or to "resist"
being confined to boundaries that are narrower than their
reach.
(36-37)

It is well to remember that Personal Influence set a lasting agenda for

American empirical communication research - stressing as it did the
important role that interpersonal communication and local
communication networks played in determining the impact and
effectiveness of "mass communication" messages - particularly political
and advertising messages. Perhaps there is not, after all, such a yawning
chasm between this study and the kind of "technological study"
recommended to us from McLuhan and Innis.
This idea of "media careers" and the importance of the technology itself
had a certain fashion in the 1960s: its promulga tor Marshall McLuhan was
a celebrity. But McLuhan was discredited as too unsystematic - if not just
plain wrong - as Rosenthal's collection indicates. Why then resurrect
notions of "technologies" having a "determining" influence? The answer
lies in the importance of the relationship between culture and technology.
McLuhan created an "essential" being to media technologies - a kind of
'medium specificity' of effect and affect such as Carroll describes in his

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account of 19th and early 20th century ideas of medium specificity in the
arts.
We need not go that far: for us it is enough to locate the particular and
historically changing relationship between technology and culture. Some-
thing of this is suggested by Carolyn Marvin:

Marshall McLuhan, a popular media prophet of the 1960s,

believed that the history of Western culture should be rewrit-
ten so as to cast successive new technologies of communica-
tion in the role of the great levers that moved it. Not the
message of communication, McLuhan argued, but the
medium - the structural characteristics of the techniques and
machines of information storage, retrieval, and transmission
- had a semiotic eloquence that overshadowed the particular
details of the content. The medium, McLuhan declared,
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'shapes and controls the scale and form of human association

and action'. McLuhan's account of cultural evolution in the
West has found little favor among historians, but his apprecia-
tion of the relationship between technology and culture and his
colorful efforts to spotlight that relationship helped focus the prob-
lem for others. That relationship is now a staple concern of scholar-
ship in the history of technology, [my italics]
("Dazzling" 256)

Perhaps the best way to think through the style of analysis Katz and Marvin
are recommending is to take a few examples drawn from radio. These
concern the relationship between radio (a broadcasting technology), the
recording industry (a printing technology) and the telephone (a machine-
aided interpersonal technology).

Talk back radio

"Talk back" radio is a comparatively recent "form" of radio, dating back to

the late 1960s and early 1970s. Talk back radio would not have been
possible without the telephone. Australian domestic telephone "penetra-
tion" did not reach the kind of critical public mass necessary for the
"promise" of talk back radio to be realised until the mid to late 1970s. Indeed
for talk back radio to work as "community talk" the listeners to the radio
program needed to be technologically capable of participating. They

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 Continuum 6:1 (1992) 0 'Regan

needed to be able to see themselves as capable of phoning in even though

most would never dream of doing so.
Talk back radio could not exist as a popular broadcast medium in the
context in which the telephone was a "luxury" for the rich, or a "formal"
medium of interpersonal communication which is what the telephone
primarily was for its first fifty years in Australia. Traces of this formality
can still be heard in the telephone voice and telephone use of older
Australians. Everyday telephone style became more informal and conver-
sational in the 1960s as telephone penetration became more widespread
and it had become socially acceptable to take children into social spaces in
pyjamas in the drive-ins and to spend long periods of time in telephone
booths. Talk back radio could not exist without an informal use of the
telephone.
Talk back's conversational style relied on a similar and progressive
informalising of the "radio" voice away from the previous "formality" of
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the radio presentation - though unseen, suit and tie were de rigueur at one
stage, and the training of radio presenters was in what today appears to be
quite a peculiar "radio voice". Talk back also required a degree of sophis-
tication in the receiving technology and the telephone line for a technically
adequate "clear" sound to result.
Finally, talk back radio relied upon the proliferation of radios in domes-
tic places and public spaces where the radio had either never been before
or had been only the preserve of the rich. Important to this "leisure" and
increasingly work place use of radio as background noise in, for example,
mechanical workshops and articulated vehicles, was its proliferation
brought about by the miniaturisation and portability of radios and their
consequent invasion of places and spaces like the backyard, the beach,
stores and workshops, and, perhaps most notably, cars.
The conclusion I want to draw from this brief discussion of a prominent
programming genre within radio is that to talk about talk back radio
meaningfully we need to consider adjacent communications technologies,
the relative informalisation of communications over the telephone and
within radio itself - paralleling an increasing "informal" use of public space.

The long playing record

Consider too the relationship between the "top forty" and the popularisa-
tion of 33 and 45 rpm records - of which the contemporary compact disk
is an intensification. Previous to the advent of this new recording and
reproduction technology in the late 1950s, the 78 rpm record was the norm

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for domestic use. These records could sustain far fewer playings than their
successors, the 33 rpm and 45 rpm single and more lately the compact disk.
The machines that they were played on required the needle to be changed
often: thereby limiting the uses made of a "record player". This meant that
radio stations and their audiences used records more sparingly in order to
preserve them. A number of programming consequences followed. Music
was turned over relatively slowly and it took longer (time wise) for music
to become redundant. Cycles of popular music were therefore longer than
today.
Enter the new record technology, which coupled longer playing and
more durable records with a needle that was equally "long playing" at a
"consumer end". In practice, the new recording technology of the late 1950s
permitted an exponential increase in the number of repeated playings
possible on a record player. At last, it appeared that the cycle of built-in
obsolescence had been broken. But in terms of radio practice and styles of
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usage, this new technology permitted a hastening of redundancy rather

than its extension in time. More plays over a shorter time period became
the norm, replacing fewer plays over a longer time frame.
This became the basis for a veritable explosion in record collecting and
in record playing in the domestic environment from the late 1950s which
came to replicate the cycles of redundancy of music known as the top forty
and top ten played on radio. How was this possible? It was possible
because the durable nature of the new records permitted both the radio
station and the consumer to play the record a potentially infinite number
of times. This enabled a greater recognition value to become associated
with a particular record as sustained replayings over shorter and shorter
time intervals developed. As a consequence, the technology that seemed
at one level to promise the kind of perdurance previously associated with
books was integral to the exhaustion of records over a shorter period of
time. As an aside, this exhaustion led to the extensive development of the
second hand record market - a market for records whose very perdurance
is a problem for their owners and an opportunity for collectors.
One cannot, then, understand the advent of the top forty since the late
1950s without an understanding of: the adjacent "recording industry"; the
sale of the record player into the home as a household necessity rather than
a dispensable "luxury" good; and the durable nature of the replaying
material for both radio station and consumer.
I am from a country farm (or "property" to use an outmoded vernacular)
and I remember the big event it was in our family when my parents bought
a record player. Our family were late purchasers. We were the "invisible"
workforce which pestered them to become as technologically literate as

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our urban school mates. They regarded it as a luxury good - and even when
they got it they did not become enthusiastic record purchasers. Quickly it
became the venue for Bob Dylan, ABBA and Sherbert - much to their
irritation. It also permitted some of us to bypass radio altogether. I still have
a Kinky Friedman record bought out of a review in the Nation Review - a
record which was certainly not played on the regional commercial radio
stations 4RO and 4CD. Of course, the advent of television is usually held
to have changed radio and shaped it towards the music industry, the DJ,
youth and day-time markets. But these markets would not have been
available without multiple radio households, transistorisation, and the
invasion of radio into public spaces. There was then a specific relationship
between record sales, the top forty, DJs and the long playing record.
Remember that in the 1920s and the 1930s the market for sheet music
was as important as the record market. The record market facilitated sheet
music sales. And this meant that a routine space for "covers" - usually live
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to air, professional and "amateur" radio shows - was created. These were
often integrated into town and country hall routines of dances and eisted-
dfords and, in the larger cities, performance halls for radio shows. The film
documentary The Queenin Australia (1954) has couples dancing on a ship's
dance floor to radio music which is then interrupted by news of the queen.
These kinds of routines helped shape a different rhythm of innovation and
novelty as popular songs became performed in subsidiary, often unpaid
community spaces. In this context it is not surprising, as Jenny Jauczius
points out, that the leading Australian performer of the 1940s and 1950s
should supplement his earnings by selling guitars on mail order (58).

"Live" radio

We are so used to mixing desks, reel-to-reel tapes and the like in radio as
a means of editing, interconnecting talk and music that it is hard to imagine
radio as anything other than edited interview and spontaneous voice. If it
is hard to imagine what radio production looked like without those aids,
it is also hard not to see it as inhibited radio. The radio of the 1930s and
1940s is often called "live radio". Typically radio professionals of that era
recall prodigious feats of memory by performers or the professionalism of
broadcasters to cover up mishaps. If live radio was usurped as a mass
broadcaster by TV, the position was somewhat reversed between the
cinema and radio; the latter impinged quite directly upon cinema's
audience (Jowett 191-92). Certainly many performers - including actors -
of the 1930s and 1940s in the US and Australia made more money from

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their radio appearances than from their film work. This was the case for
Chips Rafferty, Lee Robinson and Bing Crosby. After a period of competi-
tion between the two, a synergistic relationship emerged, with film
soundtracks finding a regular place on radio schedules. Radio acquired
performers from cinema and the advent of sound permitted cinema
operators over the longer haul to cut overheads. The relationship between
the take-off of sound cinema and the take-off of radio as a mass medium
is rarely considered. Yet radio undoubtedly hastened the introduction of
sound cinema as a way of wooing back the domestic audience initially lost
to radio. The cinema was henceforth able to cut expensive performance
overheads in individual theatres and "buy" the top acts for that 1930s
staple, the musical.
The radio schedule was quite close to the TV schedule that succeeded
it. Like TV, radio had a mix of information and entertainment - or "info-
tainment" - directed in its commercial form at a domestic audience. We so
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take for granted this audience and this home delivery that its achievement
goes unrecognised. Sometimes it's important to go to comments on a
medium right when it first started to get a sense of its peculiarity. It's for
this reason that Czitrom's quotation from an American NBC executive in
the late 1920s is worth repeating:

For years the national advertiser and his agency had been
dreaming of the time to come when there would be evolved
some great family medium which should reach the home and
the adult members of the family in their moments of relaxa-
tion, bringing to them the editorial and advertising message
... Then came radio broadcasting, utilising the very air we
breathe, and with electricity as its vehicle entering the homes
of the nation through doors and windows, no matter how
tightly barred, and delivering its message audibly through
the loudspeaker wherever placed... In the midst of the family
circle, in moments of relaxation, the voice of radio brings to
the audience its program of entertainment or its message of
advertising.
(77)

I suppose you have never thought of the radio as a psychological burglar.

But from the standpoint of mass marketing that is what it was. TV usurped
this place in the 1960s in Australia; the 1950s in America and later in most
of the rest of the world.

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 Continuum 6:1 (1992) O'Regan

In terms of performance and programming the situation in radio (as in

early TV, before video tape technology provided sophisticated post-
production facilities) was one in which the written and memorised script
played an important role. Indeed "live radio" would have been
unimaginable without a script and rehearsals for it. There simply would
not have been the same quality control. It is worth, then, putting inverted
commas around "live" because what was meant by "live" between 1930 and
1960 in Australia was very different than what it meant after that.
Because reel to reel tape was not in common use - and was indeed a
German war-time invention which took a long time to be commercially
developed within radio - it was difficult, well nigh impossible to edit
interviews so they could come back to the required length. Consequently
it was not uncommon for interviews to be carefully scripted. So too it was
impossible to control the content of interviews through the kind of seven
second delay processes that are used today. As a consequence, the scripted
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talk - and indeed the partially scripted interview - was something of a norm
within the Australian Broadcasting Commission and commercial radio.
Writing it out before - that is putting the effort into pre-production rather
than post-production - was the means through which content in radio was
kept to the required length, a level of quality control was ensured, and a
monitoring process was able to be carried out. The reading of written
material would be seen as boring radio today - but this was a particular
form of writing. This was either the writing of the prepared speech which
meshed with radio's formal mode of presentation and address; or else it
was the "informar/formal interview sandwiched halfway between
today's "live interviews" (later edited down) and the prepared speech. The
same role of writing in radio is certainly not with us today: a speechified
presentation now has to be the recording of apublic presentation or speech.
Writing as a means of monitoring and time keeping has been replaced by
the technical panoply of: tape machines rebroadcasting with a time delay;
recorded and edited interviews; and a mixed conversational performance
mode of presentation in which "urns, ahs" etc. remain, and at times self-
consciously display, thinking in process.

Radio segmentation

Radio has undergone tremendous segmentation which would have been

unthinkable less than a decade ago. Driving across the prairies of the
mid-west of the USA in 1989,1 listened to car radio. Religious radio and
business radio both refused to tell the time, only saying for example that

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it was "twenty minutes past the hour." But what hour? They did not tell
their listeners this, because the same radio was being rebroadcast across
the US at the same time: this was an "utterly decontextualised" radio not
requiring the operation of time delays. Its promise was that no matter when
it was on, no matter the time of the day - it was the same format. Therefore
the times of the day became more arbitrary markers in radio discourse. It
was up to the listeners across the US time-zones to determine which hour
it was. This was disturbing for me. I had only ever thought of radio as
providing the exact time, being of the next place or last place I had been to
- and certainly not time without the time! Both stations employed inter-
views, and commentary aimed at a segmented public. The religious radio
station was offering specialised financial advice and a combination of
fundamentalism and extreme right-wing politics.
What I found disturbing was the different construction of community
involved; and my utter lack of sympathy for any of them. No longer is the
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community just constructed vertically in the one locale with the mix of
elements shaping a diversity of programming for a diverse audience; but
there is a virtual horizontal shape to community, as community can
become defined as audiences within a number of geographic locales. This
is often called narrow casting; and some would have it succeed broadcast-
ing. But the exceptional ratings commercial FM stations in Australia have
been able to garner suggests such projections are too extreme. What we
may have instead is a mix of types of radio, with each type being organised
through a construction of its community of listeners as values clusters,
place, religious affiliation etc; and the extent to which, by channelling
meanings tightly or loosely along certain pathways, listeners are either
driven out as a means of incorporating fewer more passionately and
potentially exclusively engaged listeners often financially contributing to
the station; or are incorporated in a more ephemeral and occasionally
intensely engaged way, depending on the segment, the song, the item.
What is suggested through these examples is the persistence in the
present of a number of types of radio. We are used to seeing types of radio
not in their handling of time, space and community but rather through
legislative and funding categories: public radio, national radio, commer-
cial radio such that public radio is selfconsciously an assemblage of ele-
ments; national radio is driven by cost benefit (political and social
calculations typical of state enterprise); and commercial radio is driven by
advertising and the identifications of markets. I wonder, though, whether
it might be more useful to consider other kinds of cultural indicators here
involving program creation styles, community orientation and the like.

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Works Cited
Carey, James. Communication as Culture. Boston: Unwm-Hyman, 1989.
Carroll, Noël. "The Specificity of Media in the Arts." Journal of Aesthetic Education
19 (1984): 5-20.
Czitrom, Daniel. Media and the American Mind. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina
P, 1982.
Jauczius, Jennipher. "The Australian Country Music Phenomenon, 1930s to
1973." Honours Thesis. Schools of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Murdoch University, 1990.
Jowett, Garth. Film:The Democratic Art. Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1976.
Katz, Elihu. "The Medium and the Experience: Further Gropings Towards the
Conceptualisation of Effects." Mass Communications Review Yearbook 6. Ed.
Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy. Beverley Hills: Sage Publications,
1987: 35-39.
and Paul Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence. Glencoe: Free Press, 1955.
Marvin, Carolyn. "Dazzling the Multitude: Imagining the Electric Light as a
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Communications Medium". Mass Communications Review Yearbook 6. Ed.

Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications,
1987: 256-71.
. When Old Technologies were New. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Rosenthal, R. et al. McLuhuan: Pro and Con. Baltimore: Pelican, 1972.

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