"What These People Need Is Radio": New Technology, the Press, and Otherness in 1920s America

In the 1920s, American newspapers and magazines enthusiastically promoted the new technology of radio broadcasting in part by focusing on how the technology was adopted by farmers. The popular press depicted farmers, isolated from the urban centers and cut off from urban-based entertainment, as the ideal benefactors of what radio did best: bridge large distances and provide an abundance of information and amusement. In focusing on the farmer's potential for redemption through the adoption of radio, however, the press accounts amplified the shortcomings of farm life, casting the farmer as an anti-modern "other." These conclusions emerge from the news coverage and advertising discourse appearing in both urban and rural publications of the period.