Ieuan franklin
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1.2 Radio and OralityA fundamental question arises here about the status of the medium of radio, as regards whether (as an oral/aural medium) it can also be characterised by time-bias, and whether the language of a radio station is developed through intimate association with the experience of the community of listeners it ‘represents’. In regard to its technical nature, radio broadcasting represents perhaps the archetypal space-binding medium - short wave radio signals, for example, traverse thousands or tens of thousands of kilometres at the speed of light (approximately 300 million metres per second). Yet radio is an aural medium whose ‘primary code’ (Crisell 1994) is the human voice8 - an index of human presence - and in transmitting a flow of sound radio exists primarily in time. Unfortunately the positive aspects of radio’s status as an aural medium have often been obscured by radio’s designation as a ‘blind’ medium, lacking the visual sense.9 For example, the phone-in genre has proved more successful on radio than in television, because the interaction is enhanced by a feeling of intimacy and the absence of the “visual pictorial and visual verbal modalities” (Avery and McCain 1986: 129).10 The ‘demotion’ of radio through the proliferation of visual media has been compounded by the scholarly fixation on the text, and “the paucity of interdisciplinary vocabulary to address the aural” (Bendix 2000: 37):
Innis’ theories may prove useful in developing a theoretical framework and vocabulary to discuss aural culture. As we have begun to understand, Innis developed his sound-based theory of knowledge on the model of ancient Western oral tradition. Orally transmitted cultural wisdom fostered emotional involvement and memorization, so that listeners were encouraged to become reciters in their own right (Stamps 2001: 83). Here we might apply Goffman’s hypothesis that “what is basic to natural talk might not be a conversational unit at all, but an interactional one” (quoted in Kacandes 2001: 5). Innis believed, however, that the passive orality of radio broadcasting did little to encourage such interaction, addressing as it does “the world, not the individual” (Innis, quoted in Stamps 2001: 83).11 In place of storytelling and memorization, radio offered advertising (or announcers) and scripting (or transcription). Radio broadcasting increased the social and spatial distances between speakers and listeners, bolstering a hierarchy of communicative entitlement, and the territorializing capacities of the medium. The absence of a feedback mechanism, according to Innis, creates an irresponsible and unaccountable media structure: Technological advance in communication implies a narrowing of the range from which material is distributed and a widening of the range of reception, so that large numbers receive, but are unable to make any direct response. Those on the receiving end of material from a mechanized central system are precluded from participation in healthy, vigorous, and vital discussion (Innis 2004: 89). Radio was the principal electronic medium of Innis’ time (he died in 1952, the year that Canadian television broadcasting was inaugurated), and he had initially thought that the medium might provide the necessary challenge to the monopoly of the printed word (Siegel 2007: 123) through the technological ‘extension’ of orality. As the anthropologists Goody and Watt surmised, [Radio, cinema and television] derive much of their effectiveness as agencies of social orientation from the fact that their media do not have the abstract and solitary quality of reading and writing, but on the contrary share something of the nature and impact of the direct personal interaction which obtains in oral cultures (Goody and Watt 1962-3/1972: 347). The crucial issue here, however, is whether radio, as an agent of social orientation, can ever approximate (to) the mutuality and conviviality of oral culture. During the early years of radio, the medium had appeared to offer the prospect of widespread reciprocity, and there was optimism during the 1920s that radio would develop as a support structure for national and international dialogue, co-operation and peace. However, Innis witnessed this prospect evaporate with the use of radio to manipulate mass opinion during the 1930s (for example, the propaganda of ‘the radio priest’ Father Coughlin) and throughout the Second World War, and the general deployment of the medium as an agent of spatial and corporate expansion, in the context of Western capitalism. Thus the territorial expansion of post-industrial sounds was contiguous with the imperialistic ambitions of the Western nations, symbolized by the ‘distributive’ use of the loudspeaker to dominate others with one’s own sound (Schafer 1977/1986). As Blondheim has observed, [Innis’] pessimistic analysis of paralyzing imbalance was fully understandable when considering the shape of the media environment of his times. Throughout his lifetime media developed in a single direction – spaceward. Following the script/print model, the new media of his times made it possible to engage ever more people, less intimately, and with greater authority. The telephone had been the last technological improvement applied to oral, dyadic, two-way communications, and it had arrived three generations before Innis was writing about communication. Thereafter, the progress of media was the progress of scale, scope, and synchronicity, with fewer doing the talk, ever more listening, and no one questioning, answering or talking back (Blondheim 2004). Because it invited no response articulation, radio could be considered an aural medium, but not an oral one. One-way broadcasting rendered the listener ‘mute’, compounding the lack of emphasis on speech skills, voice quality and rhetoric in public life (Truax 2001: 170). Whereas orality has always been defined by how it is produced rather than by how it is received (hence we speak of oral tradition and not aural tradition), mainstream radio broadcasting, by contrast, has always been organized on the technical principle of universality of reception (Reith was careful to note that even the ‘lowliest cottage in the land’ was capable of receiving BBC broadcasts), with no stipulation about audience participation or the listener’s ‘right to broadcast’:12 The talk that prevailed in early broadcasting in the UK was monologue rather than dialogue, in which selected speakers spoke at length from the studio to absent listeners on predetermined scripted topics (Scannell 1991: 1). This ‘monologue’ model is clearly outmoded, yet we cannot say that broadcasting has changed so much in the interim that we cannot recognize it. Much radio broadcasting is still unidirectional and scripted - often to carefully calculate the impression of spontaneity - and interaction with listeners, although boosted by new technological developments, is heavily prescribed by both the institutional structures of mainstream broadcasting and by unspoken rules of conduct.13 Nevertheless, a different model is needed to approximate the expressive culture of modern broadcasting. Berland has cleverly utilised Innis’ theoretical framework of space- and time-biased media in a consideration of the way in which modern radio creates co-presence through the textual interaction of music and speech, creating “a special type of narrative”, “one which simultaneously addresses and represents the specific targeted community” (Berland 1990). Thus the DJ or presenter acts as a kind of narrator, and songs, news and weather reports, phone-ins and so on can be analyzed as structural functions (or polyphonic elements) within the narrative, which is constructed through their specific combination. We associate particular types of DJ with particular types of narrative, But, as with any other narration, the narrator is not necessarily the author. Traditional folk tales (aural communications that spring from and bind communities together, and have no authors) are attributed to the structural combination of narrative elements condensed across time; this notion seems obviously relevant to radio, also an aural and time-based medium. In connection with the particular temporality of (post-) modern radio, though, it is also important to think about radio narrative as a condensation of relationships in or across space. Space is collapsed because access to it is expanded; time is speeded up and broken into contemporaneous moments within the still tangible discipline of the working week. The construction of radio audiences is not simply an abstract (though quantifiable) assemblage of listeners with similar tastes, but also a ritualised transformation of people’s relationships to (and in) space and time (Berland 1990: 188). This analysis will prove very pertinent to this thesis, in particular my discussion of montage editing techniques in Chapter 4, in which actuality extracts (whether on acetate disc, magnetic tape or in digital form) are edited together to provide a ‘structural combination of narrative elements’, juxtaposing the thoughts and reminiscences of a variety of speakers. For now we might add a qualification here by distinguishing between ‘speech’ and ‘talk’, or ‘constructed’ and ‘streamed’ radio. Most of the radio programming discussed in this thesis falls under the category of what is sometimes termed ‘built programming’ such as the ‘crafted’ feature or documentary, the authored piece or the sound portrait. However, the thesis is also concerned with the way in which the evolution of language use on radio in Britain and Newfoundland during the first decades of broadcasting can be characterised by the singularity of the ‘created word’ yielding to a more social and spontaneous use of language. The type of radio programming discussed above by Berland can be categorised by the fact that it is presenter-led, and segmented into discrete items, including music, adverts, the presenter’s talk, the studio interview, the phone-in, ‘capsule’ news, weather reports, and so on (Crisell 1994: 72). As Crisell has noted, these segments are “much more apparent, more discrete and detachable” than those elements which form a ‘built’ programme such as a play or documentary (Crisell, ibid, p. 72). This ‘segmented’ radio format represents a “virtual matrix”, in miniature form, of the traditional programme genres which it has typically supplanted: “the snatch of dialogue in an advert is a tiny play or sitcom; the location report in a news bulletin is a brief commentary or outside broadcast; the on-air telephone caller answering a competition question is one of a series of challengers in an intermittent quiz show” (Crisell, ibid, pp. 66-67). This manifold or hybrid format exhibits features redolent of both informal everyday conversation and more ‘institutional’ forms of verbal interaction (for a discussion of the ‘hybrid’ nature of radio programming, see Chapter 5.6). For example, the studio-based interview may be categorised as an institutional domain, and likened with that of the courtroom or classroom (Hutchby 1991). Conversely, the informal aspects may be predicated on the principle of interactivity in phone-ins, as we will see in my discussion of the Newfoundland CBC programme The Fisheries Broadcast in Chapter 3.3.
To begin to explore this question we can consider programme formats that have, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht (1932/1964), ‘organized’ listeners in an interactive relationship with broadcasters. This will be the major theme of Chapter 3, in which a case study of Newfoundland broadcasting will bring to light examples of programmes which - often through imaginative uses of technology - have incorporated elements of (parasocial) interaction and participation characteristic of small group communication, thereby demonstrating the continuum between vernacular culture (or folklore) and popular culture (see Chapter 3.0).15 Secondly we must consider the important role of recording technology; the use of the portable tape-recorder, in particular, can be said to have bridged (the worlds of) oral history and aural history (the presentation of oral history in broadcast sound) in radio production. The idea of a ‘roving producer’ gathering oral testimony and reminiscence was finally made feasible by the arrival of the tape recorder in the early to middle 1950s. In 1952, the year of Innis’ premature death, the first radio stations placed orders for the Nagra I, the first truly portable tape recorder. Based on the same technology that ‘negated’ space, the tape recorder permitted the temporal extension of oral communication.16 The incorporation of actuality in radio production extended radio’s ‘social surveillance’, enabling the ‘laity’ (the lay public) to participate in broadcasting through the articulation of their own thoughts in their own milieu. Thus it also contributed to a greater symmetry between the contexts of production and reception of broadcasting – the places in which radio was ‘made’ and in which it was heard.17 The ability to record people in their homes meant that the natural, relaxed settings enhanced the captivating quality of the storytelling, creating the mood for in-depth absorption. This facilitated the creation (or simulation) of co-presence through radio broadcasting. Recording technology has also played a role in countering the structural space-bias of radio broadcasting in the sense that it challenged the monopoly of the new professional class of expert or broadcaster who sought to provide official versions of human thought; to “pronounce on the meaning present in the heads and lives of anonymous peoples” (Carey 1988: 168). However, the facility to edit magnetic tape made possible the manipulation of sound to an unprecedented degree, and therefore tape editing could often represent the refinement, rather than the relinquishing, of the editorial control previously provided by scripting (we will discuss this further in Chapter 4). Whilst the use of the tape recorder did not transform radio into a two-way medium of communication, it did offer a means of alleviating passivity whereby so-called ‘ordinary people’ could participate in broadcasting. To this end, the use of actuality (speech recorded ‘on location’) represented a step towards the establishment of some right of access to a microphone (a ‘right to broadcast’) for the licence-fee paying public. The use of mobile recording technology also extended the time-binding properties of radio broadcasting, as audio documents could be recorded and preserved for posterity. To use the voice of a particular speaker was no longer determinate on them being able to visit a recording studio; indeed it was no longer determinate on them being alive. In its use of recording technology and its pioneering sound archive, the BBC can lay claim to having acted as a midwife to the oral history movement (Samuel 1994: 235) as well as having created a national broadcast archive of huge importance. This was similar in some ways to the CBC in Canada, whose impact on the oral history movement and archival policy has been hugely important (see Chapter 5.2 and Appendix C).
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