ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the construction of radio in magazine advertisements when it had become a major commercial means of public communication and advertisers began to provide a social and economic rationale for the purchase of radio sets. It provides a reading of 1936 family-magazine images to reconstruct an emerging definition of radio and its place in society. The chapter constitutes an attempt to ascertain the social uses of radio–as depicted in magazine advertising texts and images–and the nature of radio as a social and cultural phenomenon in America in the 1930s, when broadcasting had been firmly established as a formidable medium of "mass" communication. Once it becomes established as a household necessity, radio dominates the social and cultural scene. Gerald Nachman's Raised on Radio provides a vivid account of those early years of radio in the homes of millions of Americans.
