Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (review)

Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern. By Susan J. Douglas. New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. xv+415. $27.50/$16.

If you have any doubt about the importance of race and gender to the history of technology, Susan Douglas will convince you in Listening In. In the process, you will learn a great deal about technology, advertising, bureaucracy, and consumption while recalling your own defining radio experiences. The personal is indeed the technological.

Douglas notes that she deliberately set out to update Eric Barnouw's classic three-volume History of Broadcasting in the United States. It was, as she admits, a formidable undertaking and, thanks to a Sloan Foundation grant, we are all the better for it. Her emphasis is on consumption. She continually emphasizes how radio invited active participation by the listener, whether it be a Jack Benny comedy, an Edward R. Murrow war report, Graham McNamee or Red Barber on sports, Wolfman Jack spinning discs, or the evocative programming of National Public Radio. One consequence was the creation of nationally constructed imagined communities, moving from the local to a mass media-mediated identity, in the building of which we were willing participants. Radio created feelings of belonging and security, building on and building emotional and spiritual desires. Change was a constant: each era listened to and used radio differently.

Douglas does not neglect technology, nor the corporate structures that ultimately tamed the insurgency of new fields. Indeed, radio's history can be seen as continual battle between oligopolistic control of programming and technological insubordination that promised local initiative and control. Repeatedly, a new field opened up, generating immense excitement, innovation, and profit. As it became more established and market-oriented, advertisers and corporate patrons rendered the field more conservative and less risk-oriented, thus taming it. New areas would always open up, only to be commodified in turn. If this cycle sounds a bit like Frederick Jackson Turner and Tom Swift meet Alfred Chandler, well, it is. Commercialization was a powerful force.

These new areas in the realms of format and technology led to the creation of new subgroups of listeners. Douglas weaves many threads into this rich tapestry, including the importance of the 1920s spiritualism craze in pushing the radio boom; the amateur radio hams, who "consistently offered another model for how radio might be used and for how to listen" (p. 328); the development of audience research; the varying but constant presence of the velvet fist of the Federal Communications Commission; and ways in which transistor radios changed the listening experience.

Gender plays an important role in Douglas's history, indicating one major shift in historical perception since Barnouw. In different ways at different times, radio helped reassure and redefine concepts of masculinity, whether via the tinkering skills of ham operators, the skits of Burns and Allen, the sports commentary of Red Barber, or the controlled hysteria of Rush Limbaugh. Reflecting and refracting American culture, radio also became a medium of desegregation, linking generations of rebellious white youth to African-American culture via musical styles. Yet as white appreciation grew, the music and venues were muted, with black disc jockeys replaced by black-acting whites. Those decrying the rebelliousness of the music of the 1960s had been equally rebellious in their earlier embrace of jazz and "race music." Douglas convincingly portrays the payola scandal of the late 1950s as a political assault on the economic and musical autonomy of disc jockeys and small independent stations that favored black music.

Among the losses incurred in the course of radio's development was the promise of bringing to the people culture and informed political debate. Another loss was more academic: Historical records...