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07149_Field_TCUM T714.txt
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1996-04-10
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939b
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16 lines
engaged in divers activities. Radio, once a form of group
listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and
individual uses since TV. The teenager withdraws from the TV
group to his private radio.
This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified
community groups is best manifested in the disk-jockey cults,
and in radio’s use of the telephone in a glorified form of the old
trunkline wire-tapping. Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas
of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was
indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of
a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders
the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical
purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of decentralized
intimate relation with both private and small communities,
could easily implement the Platonic political dream on a world