During the Depression of the 1930s, radio broadcasting brought hope to a dispirited populace. It brought the entertainment of comedy, drama, and music, plus news and information. It brought inspiring words from the president of the United States that life would get better; we would get through this. In a nation too large for a national press—based on the available technology of the day—radio commentators provided national voices.

If you already owned a radio set, it delivered all this and more at no cost to you except a minute or two of your time every so often to listen to a commercial, and some of these were just as entertaining as the programming. Illiteracy did not matter, nor foreignness, as announcers chosen for their lack of regional accents spoke to all Americans. Radio was an ideal medium for a poor society with millions of immigrants eager to learn the new language and to fit in. More than any other medium in history, the radio gave people everywhere a sense of sharing what the day held for them.

This was broadcasting, a word that did not exist when radio began, except to describe what a farmer did when he sowed his field with seed. The U.S. Navy had appropriated the word during World War I to describe messages sent to a number of ships at once; the wireless industry derived its use of the word from this. Based on the idea that rays of electromagnetic waves radiated from a transmitter, the word radio itself came into general use only after the vacuum tube sent voices into the air. The term most used was wireless. Once wireless was perfected, no part of the Earth’s surface or the sky above it would be out of range, no point beyond instant communication.

People involved with radio at its beginning did not consider broadcasting, and were not concerned with connecting with the public; in fact, they did not want intruders tuning in. They thought instead of what the telegraph could not do.

As the decades passed, each stage of radio had its own purpose, its own technology, and its own business basis. Radio was invented as wireless telegraphy, a point-to-point service. Its main business was to exchange Morse Code messages between ships at sea and shore stations. With the invention of the vacuum tube, radio began to move into the era of wireless telephony, replacing the dots and dashes with voices, but still a point-to-point service.

When its potential as a point-to-multiple-point service was recognized, when technology opened a path, and when advertising provided an economic underpinning, radio found a new social use as broadcasting. Out of radio broadcasting has come television broadcasting, and out of television broadcasting has come cable television, a non-broadcast service, but one that will be considered along with television because it is an outgrowth of broadcasting. Finally, out of broadcasting, with its effort to reach the broadest possible nationwide radio audience, has come narrowcasting, reaching a closely defined audience.

TAKEN FROM:

ALPAHBET TO INTERNET: Mediated Communication in Our Lives

by Irving Fang

Published 2008 by Rada Press

www.radapress.com