Potter noted that historians often have difficulty in writing about audio sources. How do historians engage with audiovisual sources – how do they write about them, other than as mere description or a transcript? How should historians think through the components of a broadcast – outside versus studio, music versus news, voiceover, etc? Radio producers think carefully about sound, and how to use it for messaging and other ends – how can and how should historians treat these elements, analytically? Huacuja Alonso noted that genres that historians perceive as distinct were connected for listeners: for example, entertainment and news broadcasts both drew upon the same technical staff, the same concerns about how and where listeners would listen, and what they would imagine while doing so. Bronfman noted that narrative structures influenced both genres: the idea that a news piece should have a beginning, middle and end, just like a narrative would, for example. Similarly, announcers and actors would have been trained in elocution or some kind of oratory.

Huacuja Alonso noted that listeners developed a feel for the broadcasts, because they listened more – to more programs on the same station, for more hours in the day or week or year, and to more radio broadcasts in these periods – than a historian researching a particular station or genre or period ever could. If listeners listened every day, for extended periods of time, over years, what are historians who listen to one program, in isolation, for research purposes, missing? Bronfman suggested that there is a value to acknowledging the gaps between what scholars can hear and what they can describe in words, rather than pretending that the two are commensurate. Clayton noted that listening also often involved noise – listening across static, or despite jamming. He recounted finding a scale in the US archives assessing the degree of jamming of particular stations, from zero to five. Zero would have meant total white noise, but what about jamming at level three or five? Perhaps people would not be willing to listen to those stations for entertainment, but would they have been willing to listen through the jamming, in hopes of getting snippets of information?

Ribeiro noted that his work dealt with the total absence of audio. There are no opportunities to listen to any of the sounds – no recordings, nothing. On the other hand, when there are recordings, scholars need to make an effort to match them with the text and the context of the period. Were there letters from listeners commenting on a particular announcer or a particular program? Is there historical evidence about the acoustics of the space in which people listened, including how they moved around that space, and any background noise? The challenges of reconstructing or recuperating audio cultures include the need for context, for materials – samples of old radio sets to try out, for example – and imagination.

During the closing roundtable, which featured network members Clayton, Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Kuitenbrouwer, Potter, and Ribeiro, discussions centered around how to recognize and incorporate various aspects of radio broadcasts and radio listening into scholarship. One person noted the importance of analyzing musical as well as news or other spoken word broadcasts. Music opens up other dimensions of listening, one person noted – for example, in situations of intense news and script censorship, musical selections might play an important role in communicating impressions or messages to listeners, who might be better conceived as listeners and talkers.  Others noted the ways in which broadcasting became a craft, and those involved in various aspects of broadcasting approached their work with a sense of professionalism. The group considered what elements of broadcasting might be considered sources of continuity over time – whether across decades within the radio era, or bridging between radio and other performative or informational genres.

In closing, network members posed three provocative questions. Kind-Kovacs asked how historians could write social history that integrated radio broadcasting as one kind of social expression alongside rumors and other forms? She noted that with media studies there is often the danger of studying one form as an isolated entity. Clayton noted that books are material objects with a kind of sacrality. What are the material culture elements of radio? The sacral? Ribeiro suggested that “propaganda” be considered a problematic term, given that since the end of World War II it has been deployed largely as a negative, manipulative enterprise. He noted that Jacques Ellul argues that any public communication is propaganda, because it is intended to convince, to persuade, and or to mobilize. In short, it is intended to be effective. If communication is not about persuasion, what is it?