ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a different medium in light of Marshall McLuhan's theories. It outlines that radio can be fruitfully read in terms of McLuhan's concept of auditory space, a concept that he considered paramount for the electric age. In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the radio as a tribal drum, and connects it to ideas of magic and primitivism. Radio communication is characterized by the search for communicative 'prostheses', as John Durham Peters, media theorist argues, to compensate for a presence that is lost in wireless technology and in the wireless rapture. Garrison Keillor, the popular radio host of My Prairie Home Companion, brings up the airiness, evanescence and nothingness of radio. The radio voice is as ambivalent and hybrid as is the strange, miraculous splitting up of one's voice in a self, Edgar Bergen, and his other, Charlie McCarthy.
