Exploring indices of national identity in a corpus of radio phone-in data from Irish radio (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Radio phone-in has a reflexive function in bringing the voices of a community to a community. For those who telephone the programme, it provides interpersonal communication even if they do not ‘go on air’. For those who listen in, a radio phone-in programme offers a vicarious form of interpersonal interaction. Listeners can feel close to the familiarity of the presenter and they are brought into other ordinary people’s problems and come into contact with other people’s opinions. Armstrong and Rubin (1989: 89) comment that talk radio is one of the few media that allows spontaneous interaction, and their quantitative research shows that it functions as an alternative to interpersonal interaction. According to Moss and Higgins (1979: 285), radio phone-in dialogues are easier than face-toface interaction for members of the audience because they come in recognisable formats and because the presenter has a finite range of speech strategies.