Radio on repeat
This paper is offered as a reflection on radio, the field of radio studies and its connection with contemporary themes in communication studies. First, it looks at the way in which repetition was built into the logics of radio production (and reception) in an era when programming was live and ephemeral. Repetition in this sense might take the form not only of programme repeats, but of remediations, generic conventions and routinised listening. Second, it considers the tensions between repetition and renewal in the study of radio in the context of an academy that prizes originality. And finally, it will rehearse the idea that contemporary media developments (including podcasting and platformisation) recursively play out the characteristics set in motion by radio at the dawn of the modern media age. This move involves recognising radio as an exemplary media object that is at once environment and infrastructure, technology, text and commodity form, and that represents a dynamic space of evolving practices of production, circulation and reception.
This paper builds on my recent research that in various ways takes a medium theoretical approach to understanding radio history (primarily in a Western context) and particularly the ways in which radio has been foundational in the modern mediatisation of time, from the invention of the endless, always-on availability of media to the collapsing of the distinction between subjective and environmental time. To this extent, the paper explores some of the ways in which attending to the repetitiveness of radio provides insights into a defining mode of modern experience.
Biography:
Kate’s teaching and research reflect her interests in the intersections between History, Politics and Communications. Her first monograph was Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996). Her recent publications have focused on the idea of listening as a cultural practice, a category of critique and a form of political action, as in her book, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Polity: 2013). One strand of her research focuses on listening in the modern mediated public sphere. It asks how listening has changed in relation to successive media innovations and how the act of mediated listening figures in modern public life. She is Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Cultural Studies; The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media and Radio, Sound and Society Journal.
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