ECE 2980 – Inventing an Information Society

Second Essay
Assignment
Analyze how regionalism and nationalism are related to different modes of listening to the radio in the United States from 1920 to 1980.

For long it has been discussed how the radio changed the American people – but this analysis is far too diverse and particular to each individual, since the United States have a wide arrange of ethnicity, religions, races, generations and other remarkable differences between different people. This essay will therefore focus on how the different modes of listening to the radio brought together different nation feelings to society in different timings and places.
A Cornell scholar, Benedict Anderson, while reflecting about the emerge of nationalism in one country said one day that it had to be imagined, since all the nation elements and individuals may never meet one another and “yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion”. The first notable change in general knowledge and feeling about a nation was conceived on the newspaper, that would allow several people to read the same stories about the nation and its people at the same time. The newspaper was the first proof of a country to a regular citizen that through it, would get to know people from distant lands with whom he would share his first sense of non-local community.
The importance of the radio wasn’t shadowed by the newspaper’s prior timing. Radio added one more sense to the world of mass communication. The air around the device would tremble with different voices, different news and random noises. People’s imagination would flow easier and faster with a new fluent speaker that had its own timing of sharing content. And at the same time, people could move on with their lives while listening. They didn’t have to watch or concentrate, depending on what was on.
Hearing the president address you and others as “my fellow Americans” tied diverse and unknown people together as an audience.
The radio boom first travelled through America in the 1920s.
On the early 1920s, nighttime, American boys and men would connect themselves to black boxes devices by headphones, hoping to listen. They weren’t hoping to hear a certain content or a defined person, they were looking for the different and random. Sounds that would come from everywhere so that could check how far they could listen to. We recognize here the exploratory mode of listening, when men were hoping to find change. This mode of listening allowed people to get to hear the country. People that were before just distant static image on a newspaper could now talk – and they could be head. Nothing was fixed in those years of radio (frequency of the stations, financial support, domestic locations or regulations). There were no chains (network) and almost no advertising on air. It wasn’t easy to assemble the radio back then – people had to learn how to deal with the technology of the device, being it one of the first motive of the wide masculine presence as the first listeners – and the absence of the feminine gender.
By the late 1920s, “chain broadcasting” was centralizing in New York City and standardizing the day broadcast so that people would listen to the same chain program, while independent stations would transmit locally produced programs with local talent. Both official nationalism and regionalism transmissions were shaping. In time, the popular Radio Digest saw, through its

letters-to-the-editor pages, that people were expecting the radio to reinforce a national culture.
Soon radio would become a nation building technology.
Amateurs (ham operators) constituted the first radio audience in the first decade of the century and managed a path to broadcasting by 1920. Popular culture at 1910 would call them an example of “the ambition and really great inventive genius of American boys” and after a series of conflicts with other kinds of transmissions, the Radio Act of 1912 required that all amateurs should be licensed and forbidden them from transmitting on the commercial and military wavelengths. 1924 was characterized by a phenomenon called DXing, which corresponded to the attempt to connect to as many faraway stations as possible. Imaginary listening lines expanded to connect the country. In 1925 happened the introduction of the loudspeakers and the second stage that called for music listening began. Networks were founded during this period. NBC was created in
1926 and CBS in 1927 and their purpose was to link stations via telephone lines so they could all broadcast the same show at the same time. Local shows would be substituted for shows produced in New York City and distributed across the nation. People would specially listen to sporting events – which would mold one of the nation’s common interest. The radio boom happened with music and Red Barber, the sportscaster, recalled “People who weren’t around in the twenties when radio exploded can’t know what it meant. The world shrank, with radio”.
Exploratory listening went further: some dedicated listeners had a map of the country next to the radio and they would mark it each time they found a different broadcast station. Many stations provided radio logs with the call letters, locations and power of every station in the country so listeners could always identify where the sound they were listening to came from.
In a Collier’s article titled “Radio Dreams that Can Come True”, the author observed radio
“spreading mutual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts, ideals and purposes, making us a strong and well-knit people”. DXing brought then contradictory feelings: the regional superiority and the pleasure of thinking about this big nation and its entity and culture. The listener kept a love-hate relation with both feelings
It wasn’t until 1930 that the radio played a full role in delivering and forging a national culture.
Regionalism, racial fissures and religious and gender differences were evidenced before this time, the same way that extreme and opposite ideas were planted in the listeners’ heads. Radio sets continued requiring technical expertise and women continued excluded from the new boom till this time. Manliness was highly disseminated through the radios and their contents would influence the typical American man. Radio became an extension of men’s identity.
Through radio, music became fundamental to the American experience. People could listen simultaneously to the same bands and the same songs and within a few weeks, radio could make a song a hit across the country. Ethnical differences started to matter less as the radio disseminated classical music, blues and jazz. Young people wanted the cultural hypocrisy over the music style broadcasted in radio to end. They wanted jazz. Some African American performers became famous names because of the radio and soon they became “part of mainstream American expression”. Repression was challenged in the country, for the African

American Music would be fundamental in building the identities not just of blacks but of whites as well.
Radio comedy exploded in the 1930s and ad agencies were the responsible for producing radio shows. The radio comedy changed American language: with millions of Americans from the late
1920s and on listening to the same phrases at the same time, the shows’ common expressions spread quickly and the Americans absorbed a new inflated linguistic slapstick. The radio language wars were on, in an inconsequential way and played for laughs. Language wars in the other hand may change the whole concept of leadership and power as it is the biggest instrument to rule. Radio in the 1920s brought the politicians, educators, celebrities and announcers voice into people’s homes for the first time. Listeners would make all kinds of judgments over the person who’s speaking on the radio simply based on his voice. Radio was responsible for sites of class tensions and differences between cultural homogeneity and diversity. Language over the air became controversial and some radio stations even standardized accents.
Amos ‘n’ Andy was radio’s first national program, getting people to listen to it at a fixed time every night. Radio was starting to determine how people organized their timing – and the lives of the American citizens became more and more similar, always bringing the sensation of belonging to a country where people had much in common. Radio comedy also enacted dramas about competition, authority, fairness and hope during the greatest crisis of the American capitalism. Radio comedy continued to reinforce the energy of American manhood, displaying the male verbal agility. Linguistic slapstick acknowledged that America had a lot of subgroups, many of them antagonistic to another.
By 1938 Radio coverage of the Munich crises made people stay home and listen instead of running to the street to buy newspapers. In 1940, 81 percent of the American families had radio and people followed and imagined the World War II in a daily basis. People listened to the
World War II and all other kinds of news. It was the journalistic era of radio. Americans became much more aware of the world around them and Roosevelt’s “preparedness” policies helped to sway public opinion toward support of American intervention abroad. “We” was much used in radio transmissions in order to evocate a sense of nationhood and national unity in the 1930s.
By 1954, television was in 56 percent of America’s households. But radio wasn’t gone. Some articles in the late 1950s and 1960s noted that radio showed increased advertising revenues from the year before. Listeners now turned in to stations already known for their local identification.
It’s hardly a way back to regionalism, since there are several communication devices and each of them bombs their customers with national, global or even foreign feeling. The programming schedule of the radio stations also changed: no longer would one station offer a variety of formats. They now offer the same programming all day and all night. Modes of listening were increasingly tied not just to what people listened, but where and how they would listen.
In the 1950s we also had Breakout listening that involved a conscious turn away from mainstream, adult, white culture and an eager. The teenager was welcomed and became the new target public of the DJs. In the late 1950s, housewives listened to radio four and a half hours a

day on average, preferring morning news and information shows. The Top 40 format became really popular and profitable and the stations and DJs that played this music became idols to the kids of America.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s we had the so called FM Revolution, that meant changes in technology, stagnation in the industry, regulatory initiatives, the rise of the counterculture in
America and the readiness and desire among young people to hear more complex music.
Programming decisions became centralized, as fewer and fewer people controlled which songs would be played. There was a nationalization of tastes: albums out of the mainstream had no more chances at many stations.
The radio and its several modes of listening helped shaping the nationalism and regionalism feelings over the country. Radio created many stereotypes, unmade many impressions, united a nation and divided populations several times. “Radio, by cultivating different modes of listening, also fostered people’s tendency to feel fragmented into many selves, which were called forth in rapid succession, or sometimes all at the same time.” We felt at the same time a gain of the self and a loss of the self, as for several times the feeling of nationhood was replaced by localism and vice-versa. The radio was and is an important way of communication and leisure. Today the number of radios is twice the number of people – and this number is not expected to decrease as radio is often a backstage activity – like the soundtrack of a movie, it’s there and it matters but it’s softly discrete.

References
Douglas, S. J. (2004). Listening In: Radio And The American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Kline, R. (n.d.).