Talk Radio, Discourse
Radio was the first electronic mass medium. It became a prominent part in people's every day experiences and in the discursive practices of mass media that followed in its wake. Moreover, radio was instrumental in creating communities around it and it has a central part in the public sphere. Key features of radio discourse include: intentionality, sociability, performativity, interactivity, and liveliness. There are many radiophonic genres; foremost among them is the phone-in, in which an ordinary person calls in to a program to talk with a host in front of the audience. The structure and features of phone-ins are illustrated to demonstrate how an institutional setting is achieved. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
History of Media and Communications; 
language and social interaction; 
media and society; 
public participation; 
radio
Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture
The vision of communication as authentic dialogue, as the mutual communion of souls, has animated a great many twentieth century discussions of language and communication, both in scholarly writings and in various forms and contexts of popular culture. In its various manifestations, this communicative utopia has identified dialogue or conversation as a locus of authenticity of both individuals and groups. This study traces the ways in which this utopian vision of communication has played itself out in the particular context of Israeli society through the twentieth century, encapsulating central trends in the evolving Israeli cultural conversation over the years. In this sense, it is a historically-situated study of the cultural fluctuations of a given society in all its particularity. In another sense, however, it seeks to offer a more general statement about the culturally constructed nature of the quest for authenticity as a project of modernity by focusing on conceptions of communication and language as its quintessential loci." -From the Introduction by Tamar Katriel
Questions, Control and the Organization of Talk in Calls to a Radio Phone-In
This article examines the management of participation in calls to radio phone-in programmes. In the broadcast media, there are increasing occasions for interaction between `professionals' and lay members of the public, particularly within what have come to be known generically as public participation programmes (talk shows, phone-in programmes and the like). People call in to phone-in programmes for various reasons; to give opinions, to get advice, and often to ask questions. In the particular phone-ins analysed here, callers are invited to put questions to leading politicians of the day about their election policies. In many institutional contexts for talk (e.g.courtrooms, classrooms, political interviews) the role of questioner has been found to be a more powerful interactional position than the role of answerer. Through an analysis of the organization of the phone-in calls, this article argues that the potentially powerful discourse role of questioner is interactionally `defused' through the participatory framework of the call. The author shows how the mediated interactional structure of these calls limits the range of possible actions available to callers in their institutional position as questioners, and thus produces constraints on what callers can actually achieve in this particular context for institutional talk.