Analog broadcasting, whether centralized or local, competes with new and emerging formats. Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), also called HD radio, exists but has not yet been widely adopted. It offers higher-fidelity sound quality and less interference, broader coverage, and permits up to eight additional program “side streams” ema- nating on the same signal. However, it requires different signaling technology and digital receivers; it remains to be seen whether it will displace or coexist with tradi- tional radio broadcasting. Likewise, satellite and subscription direct-to-user radio (like Sirius and XM) beam radio content, including religious programming, on a potentially unlimited number of channels. Internet radio streaming, iTunes, and podcasting, not to mentionfilesharing programs and formats, also provide a “radio- like” experience on computers and mobile devices without being “stations” in the conventional sense. These new formats were certainly not envisioned by the 1996 Telecommunications Act and complicate the audio media environment of the twenty-first century.
Increasingly,“radio” blurs the line with multimedia digital environments. Is a Web- based service like Pandora a “radio” or a “Web site”? Are podcasts downloaded through iTunes, even if originally produced for on-air broadcasting, still “radio”
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productions? These transformations to radio are part of a broader digital revolution that has beleaguered “traditional” media of all kinds, and has given consumers a dizzying (perhaps even wearying) proliferation of options.
The history of how the Internet developed is quite different from the way radio developed; there are no spectrum and no“channels” on the Web, so there’s no need to allocate frequencies except for wireless delivery of Internet content. The “air- waves” are clearly a public domain, but not so with the Internet, where delivery is through a complicated system of wires, cables, servers, commercial providers, and “access points.” Internet production further decentralizes both production and dis- tribution of audio content, a development that has thoroughly disrupted the music industry. Anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection can make startlingly high-quality audio programming and distribute it cheaply around the world.
It is safe to say that there will always be an audio dimension of religious life, and that both now and in the future we will see many platforms, some not yet envisioned, alongside analog broadcasting. In an increasingly fragmented media environment, even identity itself has become unstable; people negotiate and perform malleable identities in different contexts. Radio will continue to refract cultural tensions; listeners can deter- mine meaning and resist being identified only as consumers or commodities. Lowering the threshold for radio/audio production and distribution makes room for voices of the marginalized and weak, even as corporate radio broadcasting churns out standar- dized, faceless, and voiceless—but slickly polished—streams of audio content. Trans- mission of radio far beyond its local region and beyond the reach of analog propagation may help coalesce and shape transnational identities in an increasingly globalized world. In any case, it is critical to keep in mind that audiences are the real co-producers of radio, in that they create its meaning and its meaningfulness, whether they tune in or stream online. Even the near-total authority of “consumption” as the supreme virtue for broadcast media has never been complete, due in no small part to reli- gious messaging and to the formation of new coalitions, lobbies, and broadcasting models (Czitrom 1982: 191). Religion overlaps with radio genres in ways that demand further study, particularly with talk radio. Format categories (like “Con- temporary Christian Music”) frame cultural productions in ways that religious audiences experience as both familiar and significant. In his book on radio in the global age, David Hendy (2000) argues that media do not simply report on social worlds that would be the same without them; instead, they actively constitute social worlds. Therefore, who talks, who sings, and who listens (and what they hear) remain as important as ever for scholars of media, religion, and popular culture.
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