Looking At Our Radio Roots

Increasingly, scholars are studying the history of radio. “Occupying a research niche between the older, higher-profile province of film studies and the more cutting-edge terrain of television studies — and aided by an obsessive Internet-linked web of buffs devoted to old-time radio — scholars are shuffling through the metal disks, wax records, and audiotapes that compose the archival remnants of the original broadcasting medium. Collectively these researchers seek to break through the static of moving-image centricity in media scholarship and remind us of the first true network of simultaneous mass communications in human history.”