Radio – A Dead Medium?

Beyond the so-called ‘golden age’ of radio, the medium that defined North American culture and set the patterns for media that followed had become almost extinct for the better part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Radio had turned, in Bruce Sterling's words, almost into a ‘dead medium’. It tended to be forgotten by the public and, by and large, ignored by academics.

Radio historian Michele Hilmes, for instance, believes that the major reason for the neglect of radio is the advent of television, a brand new medium that was invented and popularized precisely at a time when a rapidly growing interest in the study of media began to develop. Marshall McLuhan, too, may have fallen prey to the fascination of the new television medium. He is regarded as the theorist of television par excellence, and even a cursory look at his writing may readily lend proof to this observation. Thus, it may come as a surprise that McLuhan also wrote about the radio, but not at great length. He probably didn't think of radio as dead, but he didn't devote much attention to the study of the old mass medium.