Interactive Cultures at The Radio Conference from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Andrew Dubber and I spent the end of July at The Radio Conference.  This is a bi-annual international gathering of radio studies academics which this year took place at York University in Toronto Canada.  The conference brought together people studying radio from across the world, and there were particularly strong contingents from Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and USA, as you’d expect from an English language conference; but most parts of the world had at least one scholar representing them.

Radio is a wide field and there were interesting papers on a whole range of topics including Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds, un-licensed stations in New Zealand, African American Citizen’s Band culture, BBC and community radio, early radio news, rock format radio and another on college rock radio in the US, experimental story-telling on the web, visual culture in radio, jazz on the war time BBC, early radio in the Soviet Union, and music radio and the music industry.

Andrew and I participated in a panel of papers on the future of music radio, where we reported on the key conclusions on our investigation of specialist music on the BBC in the digital age.