| The work examines the role and function of automotive radio in the physical and psychic mobility of postwar U.S. society. It applies a materialist/Foulcauldian approach to locating automotive radio in the cultural and economic context of the 1950s, observing its uses, and identifying content and its role in popular culture. It probes the interrelationships among new media, society, culture, and technology. Specifically, it examines automotive and portable radio in the 1950s as a case study, in order to analyze their relationships with transportation, mobility, time, space, and broadcasting practices. Postwar radio developed into new cultural forms, mobile media, constituted by political-economic changes in industry, social structures and needs, and reconfigured patterns of everyday life. This dissertation involves a cultural history of U.S. automotive and portable radio in the 1950s aimed at assessing the significance of postwar changes in radio. Specifically the research object is new cultural forms, mobile media. The research is situated within the framework of cultural materialism, and will focus upon the biases of mobile media. Furthermore, the work analyzes power in the form and content of media, with particular emphasis devoted to their role in the circulation of ideologies, and the function of broadcasting in U.S. society.;The work contends automotive radio is a unique cultural form, a mobile medium, an integral pillar of U.S. hegemony, a component of capitalist, disciplinary power, and a specific modality of power, determined by, and determining, spatial, temporal and social ideas and practices, bound up with a long-term revolution in communication and transportation characterized by increasing mobility and circulation. It engages new forms of mobile content, homologous forms suited to the new cultural forms of mobile media, by examining how they were reflective and productive of increasing aggregate and quotidian mobility, and how such programming practices reflected and were reflexive of the increasing atomization and individualized character of listeners. They reflected the ascension of the mobile audience, offering homologous, mobile programming suited to the characteristics of the audience. Simultaneously, they were actively mobilizing such audiences---in effect producing, through discourse and programming flows, the mobile audience they actively interpellated. |
