ABSTRACT
Susan J. Douglas is professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. Her book Inventing American Broadcasting: 1912–1922 deserves serious attention from students of communication for its close reading of the early, formative period of broadcasting in the United States. This chapter explores how the terms of radio listening itself were constructed, contested, and thus invented in the 1920s, by programmers and by listeners. It considers how this major perceptual shift in our culture, a concentrated and dedicated turn to listening, inflected evolving and uncertain notions of manhood and nationhood in the early 1920s. It is important to emphasize here that what quickly got coined as listening in went through three distinct but overlapping stages in the 1920s, and that shifts in modes of listening were tied to technical changes in radio apparatus.
