Accessible Radio Archive, Accessibility and Materiality in the Youth Radio Programme P4 I P1
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Mette Simonsen Abildgaard 03/03 – 2014 PhD dissertation University of Southern Denmark Department for the Study of Culture Academic advisor: Erik Granly Jensen Accessible Radio Archive, accessibility and materiality in the youth radio programme P4 i P1 Content Transcription glossary i Acknowledgements ii Dissertation summary Introduction 1 Archive 8 Accessibility 31 Materiality 54 Conclusion 82 References 86 Articles 1: Sometimes I think it is hell to be a girl: A longitudinal study of the rise of confessional radio 91 2: A telephone between us: Tværs and the materiality of the radio phone- in 120 3: Constituents of a Hit Parade. Perspectives on the digital archive and listener participation in P4 i P1's Det elektriske barometer 154 Abstract in Danish 191 Abstract in English 195 For Ava and Johan Transcription glossary Throughout the dissertation, quotes from P4 i P1 are transcribed using symbols from conversation analysis. I follow conventions in Conversation Analysis (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008), which were developed by Gail Jefferson: (0.5) A number in parenthesis indicates a pause in talk in tenths of a second. (.) A dot enclosed in a parenthesis indicates a very brief pause in talk. [ ] Square brackets between adjacent lines of concurring speech indicate the onset and end of a spate of overlapping talk. .hh A dot before ‘h’ indicates an in-breath. The more h’s, the longer the in-breath. hh An ‘h’ indicates an out-breath. The more h’s, the longer the out- breath. (( )) A description in double parenthesis indicates a non-verbal activity or my own comments on context such as music played, etc. : Colon indicates the speaker is stretching the preceding letter. The more colons the greater the stretching’s extent. Under Underlined text indicates speaker emphasis. CAPITALS Words in capitals indicate that this section of speech is noticeably louder than that surrounding it. ° ° Degree signs indicate that this section of speech is noticeably lower than that surrounding it. > < ‘More than’ and ‘less than’ symbols indicate that the section of speech they surround is noticeably slower or faster than that surrounding it. i Acknowledgements I would like to express my great appreciation to my advisor, Associate Professor Erik Granly Jensen, for seeing the value of my work as a student and encouraging me to apply for a PhD. His theoretical and historical knowledge, incisive analytical insights and calm support during the project have helped me cross the goal line. I am also grateful to Professor Paddy Scannell, who was very generous with his time when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan. Our many conversations about radio, talk, phenomenology and the dangers of constructivism have been a continuous source of inspiration to me and given me the conviction to develop my studies further. I would also like to extend my thanks to the academic and administrative staff at the Department of Communication Studies at UM for providing such a a welcoming and stimulating environment. I would like to express my appreciation to my colleagues at the Department for Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark for making the department an inspirational and pleasant place to work. A special thanks is due to Associate Professor Anne Scott Jensen and Associate Professor Charlotte Kroløkke, who generously found time in their busy schedules to read articles and reviews and piloted me through the murky waters of the peer-review process. I am also very grateful for the help I received from the members of the former research group MELVI, who read early versions of the article on Tværs and provided insightful feedback. The advice given by my former advisor, Associate Professor Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen, has been a great help in structuring and approaching the project in the early part of the PhD process. My thanks are extended to her family as well for taking such good care of our cat while my family and I lived in Ann Arbor. A special thanks is also due to my fellow PhD student Nathalie Wind Soelmark for her constant encouragement and our thought-provoking ii discussions about intentionality and aesthetics during our many shared commutes to and from Odense. I would like to thank my colleagues in the LARM project, many of who read early drafts of my articles and gave valuable feedback on presentations. A special thanks to Associate Professor Per Jauert at Aarhus University for kindly advising me on how to approach the international world of radio research. I would also like to thank LARM PhD fellow Anna Lawaetz from the University of Copenhagen, who provided me with very valuable insights about the early days of producing radio for children and youth and was very kind in sharing her expansive historical knowledge of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. I am thankful for the time former programme staff at P4 i P1, Kasten Sommer, Kenan Seeberg and Stefan Samsøe-Petersen, took to answer my questions about the history of P4 i P1. I am very grateful for the assistance provided by Per Holst and Klavs Henrik Lund at DR’s archives when I collected the empirical material for the P4 i P1 sample and for answering my subsequent questions about the archival material. I am also thankful for the assistance of the staff at the Danish Post & Tele Museum, especially inspector Martin Gerster Johansen and research assistant Jacob Vrist Nielsen. Last, but in no way least, I thank my family. My daughter Ava’s shenanigans have brought me much joy and distracted me from many lingering afternoon PhD concerns. My husband Johan has also been invaluable as a knowledgeable and reflective discussion partner. Beyond his taking over on the home front when deadlines were near, I am grateful for the many hours we have spent discussing both our PhD projects, which has opened my eyes to his field and inspired me to draw from the methodology and theory of the social sciences. It has made the often lonely process of writing a PhD a shared experience. iii Introduction P4 pop is full of what one could call present-day history about what you today think, feel and discuss. If a history professor, for instance, in the year 2077 was writing a dissertation about what the youth thought a hundred years ago and took this P4 from the first of May, 1977 from its dusty hideaway, then he would hear discussions and opinions about babysitting, contraception, scary movies and much, much more. 01-05-1977 Saying these words, P4’s host Karsten Sommer, at this early point in 1977, perfectly understood the potential and historical value of P4 i P1 as a listener-oriented youth radio programme, its encapsulation of the present-day history of the youth in the 1970s, which would continue into the 1980s and 1990s. Although we did not wait until 2077 to remove the cassettes and tape reels of P4 i P1 from their dusty hideaway and I cannot claim to be male or a professor of history, his remark struck me as eerily prescient as I heard it through my headphones in 2011 in preparation for this dissertation about youth radio. This PhD dissertation is made up of three articles, as well as a summary that describes the project’s overall concerns and context and the theory and method applied in the dissertation articles. The dissertation summary, or as it is called in Danish, ‘sammenfattende redegørelse’, is structured according to the three central themes that emerged in my studies of P4 i P1: the archive, accessibility and materiality of radio. Although there is some unavoidable repetition because these discussions also take place within the individual articles, the summary approaches these questions more universally, from the perspective of the project as a whole. The themes were chosen for their relevance to all of the dissertation’s articles, allowing me to introduce the theory and methodology of these individual studies. However, 1 focusing on the archive, accessibility and materiality of radio is also a way of showing how the articles correspond within the overall project. In this way, I think of the dissertation summary as a look into the dissertation’s ‘engine room’; the central parts of the dissertation are seen working together, and it also shows some of the grittier details of the process of putting such a dissertation together and making it work. In what follows, I will introduce the project as it appeared from my initial application for a PhD to its final format, providing an overview of the process through which I figured out what to study and how to go about it. Because the main purpose of the summary is to construct an argument regarding the overall issues of the project, as well as the theory and method applied and the results achieved, as opposed to reiterating the studies performed in the articles, I will only briefly present the dissertation’s three articles in order to place them in the project’s context. In 2007, of the eight available PhD scholarships in the LARM Audio Research Archive project, one position, under the heading ‘B&U’, referred to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR)’s Børne- og Ungdomsafdeling (the Department for Children and Youth). As an ambitious infrastructure project, LARM allowed for the possibility of gaining unprecedented access to a digital archive containing major parts of the history of public service radio in Denmark. In my response to that posting, the starting point for this PhD dissertation, I sought to take advantage of this possibility as fully as possible, and throughout, I have been influenced by the ‘new logic’ of the digital radio archive. This dissertation, however, is not my first experience in working with radio from the B&U Department.