abstract |
An open letter from Russian dissidents in 1979 described Radio Liberty (RL) as "our national, domestic station." The station could reasonably claim that the relationship that RL had cultivated with its audience helped to foster an environment of rights-based activity. Samizdat was to Western surrogate broadcasters what "user-generated content" is to the media conglomerates of today. When one's users are invested in the broadcasting enterprise, they can become a seemingly endless source of programming content, at relatively little cost to the broadcaster. But as Henry Jenkins, et al., have pointed out concerning the contemporary media landscape, there is a fine line between serving one's users and exploiting them. Radio Liberty has carefully trod this line throughout its existence. This dissertation project is a curated collection of primary source material related to the construction of a mediated relationship between Radio Liberty and its listeners. The overarching questions I address in the project center on the efforts of the station (and, indirectly, the U.S. government and other Western democracies) to establish a communicative relationship with its audience. My approach is interdisciplinary, comprising intellectual history, literary studies, and media studies, and I have chosen four areas through which to examine the RL project: 1) its founding based in the classical liberal ideology of the Enlightenment; 2) direct and multi-directional contact with the listeners; 3) the power of intellectual superstars to create a brand (and brand recognition). Informing all of these is the forbidden fruit nature of broadcasting and listening to a jammed signal. To address these questions, and in the interests of the greatest use to future scholars, I have created a digital resource, which consists of a searchable database of letters and post cards written to the station between the years 1961-1972, along with related broadcasts. Within the resource, I then created interactive maps based on the origin points of the letters, a timeline of selected letters and broadcasts, and the option to create visualizations based on thematic tags. I then employed that collection of tools to address a set of research questions in an analytical document. The end product provides an immersive experience for users. Text and media are integrated on the same pages, and the project affords linear and non-linear engagement. Most importantly, a resource such as this one is expandable, responsive, and discursive, able to grow and change in response to its readers/users. The project may be found at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/jkbrandt-dissertation/. The site is currently password protected — please contact me for access at the following email address: jkaybrandt@gmail.com
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