"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-econo
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my 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." (Publisher description)
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"With Britain's first two national commercial radio stations - Virgin 1215 and Classic FM - already on the air, the 90s are set to bring unprecedented expansion to the national, regional and local radio station network - and yet more controversy over the role of the BBC. In this new edition of Under
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standing Radio, Andrew Crisell re-addresses the characteristics of this fascinating and paradoxical medium. He explores how radio processes such genres as news, drama and comedy in highly distinctive ways, and how the listener's use of the medium has important implications for audience studies. In addition, Andrew Crisell's revised historical account of radio brings the reader right up to date, and includes a brand new chapter on talk-and-music radio - the format adopted by so many of the new stations - in which he explains why the sound medium, even more than television, has played such a crucial role in the development of modern popular culture. This new edition of Understanding Radio will be essential reading both to students of the media, and to those with a practical involvement in programme production." (Publisher description)
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