The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public by Elena Razlogova (review)

The Listener's Voice conjures a world of vibrant democratic interchange in early radio broadcasting: amateur radio enthusiasts exchanging distance cards by mail, call-in radio shows, soap opera fans suggesting plot twists and scolding the writers, and audiences alternately complying with and resisting efforts to study their behaviors and tastes. This careful, enlightening monograph is well-situated within and expands upon a growing body of scholarship that explores the social landscape of emerging mass-media technologies in the early twentieth century, particularly radio. Through a series of case studies arranged chronologically from the 1910s to the '50s, Elena Razlogova traces the role of radio in creating an interactive public sphere and defining multiple "publics," and argues that far from being a faceless vehicle of corporate hegemony, early radio tapped surprisingly deep currents of reciprocity, accountability, and cultural populism, crafting a "moral economy" of American media.

Razlogova makes innovative use of letters to the editors of fan magazines and of correspondence among writers, networks, and sponsors debating how responsive to audience mail they should be. It turns out that American audiences were never as fully tamed as broadcasters wished (or claimed). Listeners did not take radio while sitting down comfortably, as docile and well-trained audiences with elevated tastes; instead, they actively negotiated or even fought back with radio's producers over the medium's sound, content, and meaning. In so doing, Razlogova demonstrates, audiences shaped, and not merely received, radio programming and technology. Soap opera devotees openly debated in letters and the pages of fan magazines how Jane Cruisinberry's longtime saga The Story of Mary Marlin should end, which directly affected the writers' decisions. Likewise, sensationalistic episodes of Gang Busters during the war years sparked conflicting interpretations; some letters "transcended the terms of consumer entitlement set by admen and sponsors [and] held the radio industry complicit in the larger system of power relations" that turned some desperate Americans into criminals and folk heroes (p. 130). During the 1940s and '50s, unaffiliated local stations bloomed where the networks withered; disc jockeys connected directly with audiences across class, racial, and generational boundaries to compose both "hit parade" playlists of pop music and a catalog of youth lingo.

The Listener's Voice revisits some of the obsolete scientific and quasi-scientific technologies developed to measure audiences and their tastes: applause and QSL cards, Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB) and Hooperatings, and the "Little Annie" Program Analyzer pushbutton machine invented by Frank Stanton and Paul Lazarsfeld for the Princeton Radio Research Project in 1940. Razlogova analyzes the values and assumptions, as well as the effects, of this emerging audience research industry and its gradual standardization. Simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by popular tastes, researchers like Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, Hetta Herzog, and others pioneered methods for gathering data about radio programs and audiences, but also resisted those audiences' own definitions and terms in favor of critical theory and social scientific categorizing.

What makes Razlogova's book so useful is its breadth of genres, from amateur ham operators to crime reality shows, sports, soaps, and musical programming, as well as its attention to the cultural meanings of the technologies of radio broadcasting and analysis. Rather than a single unified narrative, The Listener's Voice offers a number of evocative vignettes in the history and persistence of a "participatory ethic" in American broadcasting. She reminds us that the road to radio's standardization and corporate control doubled back on itself many times. In the 1920s, "squatter stations and bootleg receivers provided the initial infrastructure for early radio" (p. 15). Even after corporate-network radio became America's dominant model, broadcasting remained a two-way technology to a great degree, with a wide and blurry band for tinkerers, callers, writers, and fans who provided an inexhaustible source of innovation, content, and commentary. Such overlapping, voluble publics provided the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of internet bloggers seizing narrative power to...