Radio's New Wave

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LISTENING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Kate Lacey

Radio in the digital age is arguably becoming more prolific, more fragmented, more manipulable, more mobile, more global, more personal. It is carried on a wider range of platforms and is less differentiated from other media than it seemed to be in the analogue age. But through all these contradictory and complex changes, and across all the variety of formats, one of the key threads of continuity that sustains the definition of radio is the construction of a dispersed and privatized public through the act of listening. The act of listening itself, however, is rarely problematized. And yet listening, as a cultural practice, is also subject to change and re-definition. This means that we do not just listen ...