Radio's New Wave

"With its lineup of first-rate scholars, Radio’s New Wave provocatively explores how digital technologies, from podcasts to web-based radio to listening in on one’s cell phone, have transformed radio, sound, and the very act of listening itself—indeed our aural environment—in the 2.0 era. Radio’s New Wave argues, wonderfully, that we move beyond the notion of radio as a device, or a national industry, and instead conceive of it as producing and requiring ‘soundwork’ across a wide range of platforms, boundaries, and eras. Smart, sophisticated, and cutting edge, Radio’s New Wave further establishes radio studies as absolutely central to 21st century scholarship." —Susan J. Douglas, The University of Michigan, author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination

"Once bound by a clearly delineated set of devices, industries and practices, radio has proliferated across platforms, standards, and devices. Taking advantage of radio’s new digital condition, Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes have assembled an impressive collection of essays by leading scholars in the field. Imaginative and ambitious in its conception, mindful of radio’s intellectual history but unburdened by it, Radio’s New Wave takes advantage of newly available digital resources and new contexts to tell radio’s past and retell its present. Transnational, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary in scope, Radio’s New Wave is essential reading for scholars in radio studies, sound studies, and media and cultural studies." —Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and editor of The Sound Studies Reader

"This stimulating and provocative collection of essays shows brilliantly why radio continues to be relevant, not just to our study of media and communication but for our broader understanding of the events and trends of contemporary history. Through a careful balance of 'big picture' analyses of radio’s ever-changing landscape and smaller, more-focused case-studies, it demonstrates the enormous variety and vitality of radio, allowing us to think about it afresh. Radio’s New Wave shatters once and for all those old notions of radio as an ephemeral, non-visual, and nation-bound medium. It replaces them with a sense of something more protean and strange—a cultural phenomenon that’s now searchable, utterly material, and constantly challenging geographical and definitional boundaries." —David Hendy, University of Sussex, author of Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening