Radio in the Global Age (PDF)

Radio in the Global Age offers a fresh, up-to-date, and
wide-ranging introduction to the role of radio in contemporary
society. It places radio, for the first time, in a global context,
and pays special attention to the impact of the Internet,
digitalization and globalization on the political-economy of radio.
It also provides a new emphasis on the links between music and
radio, the impact of formatting, and the broader cultural roles the
medium plays in constructing identities and nurturing musical
tastes.

Individual chapters explore the changing structures of the radio
industry, the way programmes are produced, the act of listening and
the construction of audiences, the different meanings attached to
programmes, and the cultural impact of radio across the globe.
David Hendy portrays a medium of extraordinary contradictions: a
cheap and accessible means of communication, but also one
increasingly dominated by rigid formats and multinational
companies; a highly 'intimate' medium, but one capable of building
large communities of listeners scattered across huge spaces; a
force for nourishing regional identity, but also a pervasive
broadcaster of globalized music products; a 'stimulus to the
imagination', but a purveyor of the banal and of the routine.
Drawing on recent research from as far afield as Africa,
Australasia and Latin America, as well as from the UK and US, the
book aims to explore and to explain these paradoxes - and, in the
process, to offer an imaginative reworking of Marshall McLuhan's
famous dictum that radio is one of the world's 'hot' media.

Radio in the Global Age is an invaluable text for
undergraduates and researchers in media studies, communication
studies, journalism, cultural studies, and musicology. It will also
be of interest to practitioners and policy-makers in the radio
industry.