I wasn’t satisfied with Starr’s treatment of the “public sphere” vis-à-vis the emergence of radio. I kept hoping that he’d talk about how radio shaped the public sphere or created its own public sphere(s), but he never really went there apart from talking about how radio served political ends. Instead of just bitching about it, however, I’m going to try to lead us toward the kind of discussion that I wish Starr would have undertaken.
First I want to begin with a pretty obvious point: radio, like any kind of media, targets a particular market or audience. A college hip-hop station will target a different demographic than a station that specializes in adult contemporary, which will target a still different audience than an AM “talk” station will. In this general way, I think it’s fair to say that these different audiences constitute different publics. What’s to follow is a consideration of how radio programming establishes and shapes its publics.
I’d like to turn to an interesting essay that I read last week for Jeff Williams’s LCS I class (which Gavin and Thomas are in, too) called “Housewives and the Mass Media” by Dorothy Hobson. Hobson talks about how housewives in the British 1970s listened to radio during the day in order to feel less isolated. The DJ, Hobson suggests, plays a big role in this phenomenon: “[. . .] the disc jockey can be seen as having the function of providing the missing ‘company’ of another person in the lives of the women who listen” (107). Hobson talks particularly about radio personality Tony Blackburn (the sexy bloke in the above photo), who, she tells us, “knows who his audience is” (108). What’s interesting to our thinking of the public sphere is Hobson’s assertion that the DJ “links the isolated individual woman with the knowledge that there are others in the same position [. . .] – in a sort of ‘collective isolation’” (108). This language is rather reminiscent of the segment in Bernard Anderson’s Imagined Communities where he explains that novels and newspapers suggested simultaneity and, in turn, a public sphere/nation/community. To sum up, it feels as though Tony Blackburn’s radio program gave rise to a public sphere—thousands of isolated housewives—and shaped the community by providing “company” and by, of course, providing that group with news, popular music, etc.
Also worth thinking about here is the role of radio during the early rock ‘n’ roll era. Here is an arena in which radio programmers and DJs were explicitly targeting youth while simultaneously introducing a new music genre and, thus, a new culture (even if they didn’t know it). In his book All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America, Glenn Altschuler explains that “After school and late at night, radio ‘narrowcasted’ to teenagers, who used car radios and portable transistor radios to take the music wherever they went. Rock ‘n’ roll DJs became powerful figures on radio, commanding high salaries and the loyalty of listeners as arbiters of musical taste” (131-32). This “narrowcasting” that Altschuler talks about is interesting; as in the case of Tony Blackburn, Altschuler suggests that many other DJs and stations knew who their audience was. This discussion makes me think of George Lucas’s film American Graffiti. All of the kids in the movie drive around their small town while listening to DJ Wolfman Jack—they’re united through his program, and, if you’ll forgive the tiresome cliché, the music he plays is their soundtrack. In the context of the film, Wolfman Jack’s program threads together all of the various characters’ actions and plots, suggesting a particularized public sphere: “cool” teenagers.
These are just a few prompts to get us thinking about this. What other examples can we cite that might illustrate how radio programming created a public sphere or multiple public spheres?
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