1920s Mass Culture

Mass culture is defined by ideas and values that develop from a common exposure to a source of media or news source. This style of culture emerging in America during the 1920s and defining the era existed by the distribution of information from one source to many people all at once. Before then culture arose from day-to-day interactions between people. Before the radio mass culture was essentially non-existent, the culture was defined to local communities through the daily interactions of people ("Mass Culture - Oxford Reference"). When radio was popularized it became the common source of media that brought communities of the United States of America together by providing it with a common culture. This paper will focus on the birth of radio in the 1920s, elucidating how advances in radio brought about a newer America through its emergence and growth. The technology behind radio actually existed prior to the 1920s. The only people to use it before the 1920s were soldiers in the military and hobbyists.Radio was popularized in the 1920s when one hobbyist, Frank Conrad, engineer for Westinghouse set up a radio station on top of his garage in a suburb of Pittsburgh. After the end of World War I, …show more content…
The station had got permission from the federal government announcing that Warren G. Harding had won the position of president of the united states over James Cox. The message was heard from New Hampshire all the way to Louisiana. This aroused competition quickly resulting in many new stations, by the end of 1922, there were over five hundred stations across the United States ("Radio In The 1920S"). No regulation over the radio enterprise resulted in chaos when stations would fight over call letters and frequencies, each was trying to out broadcast other stations ("Radio In The 1920S"). This was put to an end in 1927, congress had created the federal radio commission restoring order to the