Radio in the Global Age

By David Hendy

Book Overview

Radio in the Global Age offers a fresh, up-to-date, andwide-ranging introduction to the role of radio in contemporarysociety. 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 andradio, the impact of formatting, and the broader cultural roles themedium plays in constructing identities and nurturing musicaltastes.


Individual chapters explore the changing structures of the radioindustry, the way programmes are produced, the act of listening andthe construction of audiences, the different meanings attached toprogrammes, and the cultural impact of radio across the globe.David Hendy portrays a medium of extraordinary contradictions: acheap and accessible means of communication, but also oneincreasingly dominated by rigid formats and multinationalcompanies; a highly 'intimate' medium, but one capable of buildinglarge communities of listeners scattered across huge spaces; aforce for nourishing regional identity, but also a pervasivebroadcaster of globalized music products; a 'stimulus to theimagination', 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, thebook aims to explore and to explain these paradoxes - and, in theprocess, to offer an imaginative reworking of Marshall McLuhan'sfamous dictum that radio is one of the world's 'hot' media.


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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074562068X
• ISBN13: 9780745620688
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"