From radio listening to television viewing in the 1950s: reflections on a blindspot in media history

This chapter reflects on the way in which the media practices of the 1950s were pre-occupied with new organisations of sound and vision, and yet how - in contrast to new forms of spectatorship - the role of listening occupied a curiously subdued and ambivalent status in contemporary discourses. The history of broadcasting in particular during this period is often told in terms of a ‘decline in listening’ as more people turned to watching television. Yet the television public was, of course, also ‘listening’, and it is this blindspot in both contemporary and retrospective accounts that this chapter is concerned to put into the spotlight.