Radio and the Culture of Listening
Launch library · evergreen read
Radio asked something of its audience that television and later screens did not: full attention without a picture to lean on, which shaped a particular, more concentrated culture of listening around the medium in its early decades.
Families gathered around a single radio set developed shared listening rituals, a communal attention that has largely dispersed as listening became a private, individual, and often background activity carried out alongside other tasks.
Something of that older, more focused culture of listening survives in dedicated radio audiences today, who often describe a kind of attention to spoken word that other, more visual media rarely seem to demand or reward in quite the same way.
Podcast listeners today, often tuning in through headphones during a solitary commute, have quietly revived something of this older, more concentrated form of attention, even though the communal gathering around a single shared set has long since given way to a much more private and individual habit.