 Radio, Television and Media
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Philips Autoradio
By mid-decade, the radio was on its way to becoming a center of a domestic life in the middle-class households of North America and Europe, as in Britain.
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Population changes are being paralleled by functional shifts within society, which are likewise reflecting themselves upon the family. Most important of these is the rise of individualism.
Familism might be defined as the opposite of individualism; it is a form of social organization in which all primary interests and values focus about the family rather than the person. Early societies were like that, as are also some of the more agricultural ones today. Under such a system kinship bonds are strong and interpersonal loyalties among family members are great. The emphasis, in familistic societies, is always upon group solidarity, never upon individual prerogatives. Child discipline is relatively easy, therefore, and divorce between mates exceptionally rare.
Mechanization and urbanization have tended to make difficult the familistic way of life. Factory work usually takes people outside of homes. Specialization decreases the number of interests that people have in common. New vistas are opened up and many start to chafe under the old restraints. Thus it is that, with the Industrial Revolution, came a new and growing emphasis upon the rights and powers of the individual. There came to be a cult of individualism, as a matter of fact, which found its political expression in democracy, its economic expression in laissez faire, and its philosophical expression in various theories of progress. While technological specialization has practically eliminated economic self-sufficiency, and in that sense made people more dependent upon society, it has made them more individualistic so far as the family is concerned.
Radio, child of the new technology of electronics, was the first new medium of the 20th century. The Marconi Company had begun communicating with ships at sea in 1897; the military applications of radio speeded its development.
Wartime British and American research into the transmission of speech pioneered the close cooperation between govemment and corporate research in what was later termed the "military-industrial complex".
The United States govemment encouraged the major communication corporations, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT & T) and General Electric (GE), to create the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as the instrument of American technological preeminence. In Britain, Marconi maintained its dominance of the radio industry.
All this was undertaken with no thought that radio would be used principally for broadcasting. The fact that radio signals could be received by anyone with suitable equipment was considered a major handicap by its military users, and a nuisance by govemment agencies responsible for supervising the chaotic confusion of signals in early radio.
Demand for broadcasting came from amateur enthusiasts who had bought or built receiving sets to listen in to radio signals. In June 1920 the British newspaper the Daily Mail sponsored a broadcast recital by the opera star Dame Nellie Melba, which was heard by listeners all over Europe. The publicity this generated showed the new medium's potential public appeal, but further developments in Britain were hindered by official hostility to Marconi and by complaints from the military that an invention ideally suited to be a "servant of mankind" was being treated as "a toy to amuse children".
In the United States Westinghouse, excluded from the RCA-GE-AT&T combine, recognized the commercial potential of broadcasting. It opened its first station, KADA, in Pittsburgh, in the fall of 1920, as part of an aggressive marketing campaign to sell radio sets. Its success was rapidly imitated, and by the end of 1922 there were 570 licensed stations. As with the nickelodeon boom in 1906, radio provided a new means of consuming leisure. The huge demand for entertainment received directly into the home outstripped the manufacturers' capacity to supply equipment. By 1924 two million receivers had been sold.
It was far from clear exactly what this new commodity was, or, indeed, how it should be used. When the world's first radio play was broadcast by the BBC in Britain in 1923, listeners were encouraged to switch their lights out so they could "more easily imagine the scenes". Programıning on early American stations was diverse, rnixing liye and recorded conservatory music with ta1ks, ruclimentary news reports and broadcasts of church services. Almost half the stations that were operating in 1922 were mn by radio and electrical manufacturers as a way of merchandising their goods. Others were run by newspapers, department stores and other commercial concerns seeking public goodwill.
These stations were the beginnings of commercial radio, but the first problem they had to solve was how to turn broadcasting into a commercial operation. Once the receiver had been purchased, no further transaction took place between the supplier of home entertainment and its consumer. As John Reith, first Director General of the British Broadcasting Company explained, "The broadest is as universal as the air ... it does not matter how many thousands there may be listening; there is always enough for others, when they too wish to join in ... it is reversal of the natural law that the more one takes, the less there is left for others." What, then, could be sold?
The solution devised by commercial radio in effect involved selling nothing to the listeners, but rather selling the listeners themselves to advertisers, who paid for the opportunity to persuade listeners to buy whatever they were selling. The first commercial was broadcast in August 1922, but such a solution to the financing of radio was widely regarded as undesirable, even by advertisers themselves, who saw radio as "the great genteel hope" for the cultural redemption of the masses through the "public service" of business paternalism. in the first years of American radio, one in every eight stations was operated by an educational institution, but by 1925 it was clear that radio was commercially too useful to be left to educationalists. With the passage of the Radio Act in 1927, American airwaves were dominated by three networks supplying local stations with packages of programs: two were fed by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a subsidiary of RCA, and the· third was the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).
Television as the surging home entertainment medium turned radio stations toward the disc jockey format of record programming. New sizes, speeds, and materials for the records themselves may have had wide implications. Belz makes an interesting analysis of the cultural meaning of the shift from 78 to 45 rpm records, as streamlining the experience of recorded music toward casualness, especially for young audiences, while their parents bought the more substantial 33 longplaying records that emerged at the same time in the early 1950s.
The later movement of rock and its audience into long-playing records reflects the triumphing cultural and economic power of the same young generation, along with a growing seriousness and self-confidence of the makers of rock music. To an even greater extent than the movies, radio became both a commodity and an instrument of consumer culture. By 1930 there were 13 million radio sets in use in more than 40 percent of American households, who listened to a mixture of variety shows, based on the format of vaudeville, drama (predominantly comedy, with the blackface duo of Amos 'n Andy, minstrel show characters adapted to radio, the most popular individual program in the Iate 1920's and early 1930's), news, recorded and live music.
The relationship of popular culture to ideology in the 1960s and into the 1970s has become of interest to academic sociology, although the alarmed interest of politicians has given way to accommodation. The relationship of the entertainment favored by highly visible classes of teenagers and young adults to the behavior of that audience, and especially its use of drugs, is probably now still too current an issue for full perspective and confident judgment. The history of popular music suggests that it is very unlikely that musical entertainment can induce new behavior, or even introduce new ideas to the audience it must court in order to sell itself.
Though popular music has been blamed in the past for undermining community standards or otherwise damaging society, it is a new phenomenon for popular music to have the pervasive presence that prosperity and the portable radio and tape deck have given it lately, and for such conspicuous economic power to be vested in a youth audience. The history of popular music that is now happening cannot be fully schematized and managed by the patterns of earlier popular music. Its development has always been contingent, surprising, and even discontinuous except when we rationalize it with hindsight, and it is continuing that unpredictable development now.
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