Radio's New Wave

INTRODUCTION

Making Radio Strange

Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes

A little more than a decade ago, we embarked on a project that was hailed at the time as a landmark in radio studies. The Radio Reader, a collection of essays on the past, present, and future of American radio, signified to many readers that, at last, radio had achieved the status of a legitimate field of study, on a par with the visual and literary arts, a medium in its own right. Radio had arrived. The authors whose work we selected for that volume hailed from a wide range of disciplines—American studies, history, literature, communication and media studies, cultural studies, political science, journalism—but all had discovered in broadcast radio a significant cultural technology ...