Early Radio Listening as Modernist Practice: Ambient Radio and the Aesthetic of Distraction

Abstract

Moving beyond radio's textual affinities with neighboring forms of modernist art, this essay explores the listening practices and modes of aural experience associated with the medium during its initial growth period in the United States from 1920 to 1930. Challenging emphases on private domestic space as the privileged site of radio reception, it argues that encounters with radio in public spaces outside the home were equally important for shaping popular experiences of broadcasting and linked the medium to a modern aesthetic of distraction. Public listening on city streets, in department stores, and at early trade shows positioned radio as an aural attraction that invited short bursts of attention and encouraged practices of acoustic flanerie. Listening in spaces of public recreation, by contrast, invited more sustained engagement but positioned radio as a background medium and object of secondary attention. These twin regimes of ambient radio and their associated modes of distracted listening echoed parallel tendencies observed by scholars of visual modernity, while indexing much broader structural and experiential shifts in early twentieth century urban life.