| This dissertation examines how American audiences shaped the early broadcasting industry, and how radio shaped American social imagination. In the 1920s and 1930s, American broadcasters relied on fan mail and creative hunches more than on emergent, and still dubious, ratings and surveys. In this period, listener response influenced radio technology, genres, and institutions. Listeners reinvented the new sound medium to help them perceive modern structures of power and authority governing their daily lives. Against elite proponents of radio uplift, popular audiences championed technologies that constructed the immediate aural experience of sports and music and immediate, intimate connections between performers and listeners. Against the rising national networks, urban ethnic workers and midwestern farmers for a time upheld local and regional stations in the 1920s. In Depression-era network radio, soap opera writers molded the genre in response to women listeners' letters. In turn, women extended their sense of entitlement, negotiated in correspondence with writers, from the radio industry to the larger society.; This reciprocity between broadcasters and listeners began to break down around 1940. By then, major radio genres took shape, and broadcasters no longer accepted listeners' beliefs about entitlement and justice in media and society. In conflicts with producers of a true-crime show Gang Busters, workers, farmers, and Indians articulated a populist critique of the radio industry and economic and racial inequities of modern America. At the same juncture, academic ventures such as the Princeton Radio Research Project honed and validated statistical audience survey methods. Eager to deploy ratings and scientific marketing surveys, broadcasters no longer invited audiences to participate in the creation process, but only allowed them to express quantifiable “likes” and “dislikes.” But scientific marketing never triumphed completely—as television producers embraced ratings, audiences gained more control over local radio. Early interaction between broadcasters and listeners thus provides clues to recurring cycles of grassroots and corporate influence in broadcasting, the Internet, and other media. |
