ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1950s, techniques for automating audio playback took part in internal transformations for broadcast radio that accelerated into the twenty-first century. Looking back from the present state of American radio, in which automatedness characterizes large parts of the medium, this chapter shows how radio automation came to be culturally defined following a simple technological convergence. This overview contributes to a re-introduction of technical detail within a cultural studies approach to radio historiography. The first section explores the basic sonic control mechanism that underpinned the first devices to be termed ‘automation’ in radio studios, noting the rhetorical work and institutional strategies that bound this technique to an industrial trajectory. The second section follows that trajectory into an explosion of participants in the 1960s through the 1980s, demonstrating automation’s interconnection with formatting and consolidation as trends that reshaped the medium. Lastly, the chapter considers a friction between automation and autonomy that animates creative decisions in radio today; that friction also returns researchers to questions about the possibility for repurposing technologies like automation toward different political ends.
