Hendy, David (2000), Radio in the Global Age, (revised edition), Polity Press, Cambridge, 260 pp. ISBN 0 7456 20698
Reviewed by Barbara Alysen
Deakin University
The first thing that strikes you about David Hendy’s comprehensive overview of contemporary radio is that it exists at all. Radio, as the author notes early on, is often overlooked among the modern media. The medium McLuhan designated as hot in a world he predicted would favour cool media (p. 1), radio has survived, even thrived. For example, Australians have between them some 36 million radios and more than half of all households boast five or more sets (Radio Marketing Bureau, 2000, 242). But as much as radio is ubiquitous, it remains taken for granted and a media minnow (p. 2–3). Radio, Hendy says early on, needs to be reconnected with the mainstream of media and communication studies. (p. 5)
The casual relationship we enjoy with radio is made explicit in our pattern of consumption. By the end of the last decade, the Australian Bureau of Statistics could report that adult Australians watched about two hours of television a day and listened to about 80 minutes of radio (ABS, 1997:37). But, unlike television, radio was primarily an accompaniment to other activities and received
undivided attention for just eight minutes daily (1997:41).
While listeners in the developed nations tend to treat radio as a sort of aural wallpaper, for much of the developing world it plays a completely different, and pivotal, social and political function as the primary means of disseminating information, particularly in areas of low literacy. The indifference with which
radio is sometimes treated tends to obscure the significance of patterns of change within the industry and the way in which these fit into larger media debates. Hendy’s focus is that radio, in one sense the most localised of the mass media, is also part of the wider environment and that “…many of the same processes – the growth of multinational corporations, the splitting of audiences into niche markets, the drive to reduce costs and maximize profits – can… be used to explain many of its characteristics”. (p. 5)
|
