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Essay on Radio Creating a Shared Culture

Decent Essays

When the world was still dominated by a purely oral culture, the term shared culture was not even a possibility. The switch to literate culture and the invention of writing was the gateway to the beginning of a shared culture as it allowed ideas to travel without the boundaries of location that were previously in place. The notion of having a shared culture only further increased with the introduction of the telegraph and telephone as it allowed for not only the sharing of ideas with people over great distances, but it did so in an efficient time frame that made it possible for people to be reading the same stories at the same time. This was the first step in creating a unity as having a shared foundation of knowledge is what brought …show more content…

This was very obvious in the time of the Titanic as radio acted as the line that connected the ship to broadcasters and then broadcasters to the rest of the public. However, in this case the ease of the radio was not as welcomed. As stated in Communication in History chapter 27, it was incredibly easy for amateur broadcasters to interfere with radio signals and in this case one those people passed along the message that all passengers of the titanic were safe. When the opposite was found to be true everyone was outraged, but it was still a feeling that was shared by the nation and that knowledge united people. As for events that hit closer to home, nothing hit worse than the Great Depression. As stated by Christopher Sterling and John Kittross, when the depression hit Roosevelt began his fireside chat program that was extremely popular with the American public. Radio made these chats seem like the president was having an intimate conversation with each person which helped to boost morale and encouraged unity among the people. The same idea occurred during war time, specifically during the coverage of Munich, when broadcasters created the Roundtable program (Murrow, pg. 44). Further into the war radio was able to inform Americans about the events taking place in Europe and once again enable them to form their own opinions on the matter while still being a part of the larger mass society.
As radio started to get more specialized, programming

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