Entertaining Furniture
Radios were the first bit of decorative electric furniture to come into people’s homes a bit less than a century ago. The earliest household radio sets were big and heavy, full of heavy metals and glass tubes, tastefully housed in a dark-stained wooden box. They stood on the floor, or they sat on a table or credenza, near one of the few electrical outlets that homes had. The magic that made them “wireless” wasn’t battery power, after all.
The technology for continuous radio transmission wasn’t available until around 1920. Up until then, radio was only used for two-way Morse-code-type transmission. Radios became part of the home furnishings during the 1930s. They would ultimately get nudged out of their central position by television sets during the 1950s.
Radios and then TVs were a major investment in their heyday, not something a family would typically have multiples of. Entertainment, thus, was tailored to the broadest home audiences of the whole nuclear family rather than to individual viewers consuming the medium by themselves. For one, advertisers would not sponsor programming that offended or upset a wide audience. By today’s standards, much of that entertainment was bland and uninspiring because it was aimed at the widest possible range of listeners. (Newspaper advertising had a similar mellowing effect on print news.)
For the longest time, wireless media had built-in limits on access to middle-class homes, entering solely via the living room. The advent of personal computers just in time for the invention of the internet broke apart that media bottleneck. Now you didn’t need to own a radio transmitter or television station or a printing press to disseminate entertainment to distributed audiences. It’s interesting to reflect on just how brief the glory days of mass-broadcast entertainment actually were.
Where do things go from here? Radios are mostly marginalized—even in cars, where they’re built into the dashboard, many people ignore them in favor of connecting their smartphones. TVs are still a main bit of furniture in the living room, but they aren’t the lookers that they used to be, with modern users preferring all-screen designs without a lot of fancy woodwork as a frilly casing. Besides, fewer and fewer people are watching the same thing simultaneously. People get their kicks from streamed on-demand scripted programming as well as from social media content creators, viewed on handheld devices. Is it just a matter of time before televisions become obsolete?
The "Ace Hardware" spammers have stopped telling me that I've been chosen, and have started referencing "Your Bonus," whatever that may be. Yeah, that'll work now!
Over on the mothership, troll John N. is telling people to "run along."