Welcome to the uncertain world of "Radio 2.0"—where podcasts, mobile streaming, and huge music databases are the new reality, as are tweeting deejays and Apple's Siri serving as music announcer—and understand the exciting status this medium has, and will continue to have, in our digitally inclined society. How did popular radio in past decades—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats" in the 1930s through Top 40 music and Rush Limbaugh's talk radio empire—shape American society? How did devices and systems like the iPhone, Pandora, and YouTube turn the radio industry upside-down? Does radio still have a future, and if so, what will we want it to look like? Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium covers the history and evolution of Internet radio, explaining what came before, where Internet radio came from, and where it is likely headed. It also gives readers a frame of reference by describing radio from its introduction to American audiences in the 1920s—a medium that brought people together through a common experience of the same broadcast—and shows how technologies like digital music and streaming music services put into question the very definition of "radio." By examining new radio and media technologies, the book explores an important societal trend: the shift of media toward individualized or personalized forms of consumption.

Uneasy Listening tells the story of the epic battle over five listener-supported radio stations that rocked the American Left and raised difficult questions about public broadcasting in the United States that have yet to be answered. Praise for Matthew Lasar's first book on community broadcasting, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network: "Pacifica Radio outstrips anything that has ever been produced not only about the Pacifica experience, but about American cultural radio," Lorenzo Milam, author of Sex and Broadcasting "A tremendous book, combining superb scholarship with an intoxicating story of vision, creativity and heroism," Robert McChesney, author of Our Media, Not Theirs "Enlightening and entertaining . . . makes a real contribution to the history of postwar America," Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom Lasar has an eye for paradox, irony, and contradiction, but he is first and foremost an able and astute historian, not a satirical novelist, and he does a lot more than air KPFA's dirty laundry. He shows how much the philosophy of the station was shaped in part by the political atmosphere of the Cold War and McCarthyism . . ." Jonah Raskin, Santa Rose Press Democrat