Synopses & Reviews
Few inventions evoke the same amount of nostalgia and deeply personal memories as the radio. Ask just about anyone born before World War II about the role of radio in his or her life, and in the life of the country, and you will see that person go back in time, with an almost euphoric pleasure, to other eras and places, when words and music alone, without any accompanying images, filled their heads and hearts. Much of this world is gone forever, having lived only briefly before evaporating into the ether; only portions remain preserved on tape.
This book is about those times -- whether curled up in bed, sitting in the living room with family, or blasting around in cars -- when Americans listened to radio, often with a passion. For all of this century, listening to radio has been a major cultural pastime. Radio's dominance peaked in the '30s and '40s, but its importance to other eras, including our own, is no less significant.
Douglas gives readers a guided tour the growth of radio as shaper and reflector of America's imagination. She begins with the radio comedies and music hours of the 1920s and 1930s, and moves on to the role of music programming (from jazz and the Philharmonic to rock and roll bursting from every convertible tooling down the strip), the power of the war correspondents, the pull of quiz shows, the rise of DJs as cultural heroes, the subversiveness of ham operators, the artistry of radio sportscasters, and the standard-setting of National Public Radio. Douglas's survey takes us all the way up to the opinion-makers of today, who soothe, advise, and provoke modern listeners, and to ways that the study of radio listeners -- the birth of modern research -- created thedynamic between advertiser and consumer that dominates our present culture.
In the end, Listening In is nothing less than a history of the American mind in the twentieth century.
Synopsis
Few inventions evoke such nostalgia, such deeply personal and vivid memories as radio-from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern. Listening In is the first in-depth history of how radio culture and content have kneaded and expanded the American psyche.
But Listening In is more than a history. It is also a reconsideration of what listening to radio has done to American culture in the twentieth century and how it has brought a completely new auditory dimension to our lives. Susan Douglas explores how listening has altered our day-to-day experiences and our own generational identities, cultivating different modes of listening in different eras; how radio has shaped our views of race, gender roles, ethnic barriers, family dynamics, leadership, and the generation gap. With her trademark wit, Douglas has created an eminently readable cultural history of radio.
"Douglas's wonderful book offers a sophisticated history of radio listening." -Journal of American History
Susan J. Douglas is professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.