Cari amici vicini e lontani. L'avventurosa storia della radio

[Autom. eng. transl.] Seen today as a familiar and somewhat démodé object, the radio was actually one of the most disruptive technological inventions of the modern era: a child of electricity, it was born from an extraordinary competition of talents and fantasies and immediately established itself for the revolutionary novelty of its "immaterial" communication model. This book tells the story and the eventful journey in search of a cultural location: conceived at the beginning as an anti-mass medium destined not for the wide dissemination but for the transmission of coded messages, in the first decades of the twentieth century radio became the status symbol of the middle class eager to open a window on the world from the intimacy of its living rooms. Happily promoted to a democratic means of home entertainment thanks to music programs, sports news and the new forms of popular storytelling such as "soap opera" magazines, the radio also becomes a political propaganda tool making Roosevelt's "talk of the fireplace" resound and Mussolini's voice in the homes of all citizens. New home for aggregation in the twenties and object-fetish of sixties youth movements, institutional vehicle of war bulletins and irreverent instrument of Orson Welles science fiction pranks, the radio has accompanied the decisive moments of the last century and still enjoys a unsuspected vitality.