The first generation of radio scholars labelled radio ‘the blind medium’ and returned obsessively to cataloguing the benefits and drawbacks of blindness. Not only was blindness a ubiquitous metaphor for defining the non-visual qualities of the radio medium, but early radio dramatists often used blind characters to orient listeners to the auditory space of the radio play. Looking back at this literature, a pattern emerges in which scholars evoke the experience of the blind, only to discount the blind listener as the imagined audience of radio broadcasting. This chapter will consider the central role of disability in defining early radio for producers, writers and critics, and also its significance for blind listeners. Radio broadcasters could evoke blindness, but they were only rarely – and opportunistically – willing to define the medium by its accessibility to blind listeners.

The proliferation of audio technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a renewed interest in sound, an interest that sparked anxieties about the hierarchy of the senses. This hierarchy positions sight as ‘higher’ than hearing and has been, according to Martin Jay, a pervasive thread in Western thought, reaching back to Plato and leading to an understanding of sight as the ‘master sense of the modern era’ (1993: 543). Jonathan Sterne describes the dominance of what he calls an ‘audio-visual litany’ in American and European philosophy and cultural criticism, which characterises hearing as ‘manifesting a kind of pure interiority’, while either praising or blaming vision as a sense that allows distance and, with it, reason (2003: 15). The literature around one twentieth-century sound technology – radio – reveals that an underlying concern in these debates about hearing versus seeing is a preoccupation with disability, and particularly blindness. In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard J. Davis describes how the rise of print focused attention on deafness among a public acclimatising to silent reading. If, as Davis writes, ‘Europe became deaf during the eighteenth century’ (1995: 51), then blindness came to define the sonic landscape of the early twentieth century as radio producers, writers and listeners learned to communicate with what was, for many, an unnervingly auditory medium.

Over the last ten years, modernist studies has seen a new wave of work in radio studies, often under the label of ‘radio modernism’, first coined by Todd Avery (2006).