Intimate Messages: A History of Interactions in Youth Radio

Between 1973 and 1997, young Danish radio listeners turned on their radio Sunday nights, when the radio waves were dedicated to issues like youth unemployment and confessions of Saturday's mistakes. For 24 years the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's popular youth radio program 'P4 i P1' was on the air. A cornerstone of the program was audience interaction, where its staff experimented with everything from call-ins and letters to answering machine messages.

This study tracks the changes in 'P4 i P1' during these years. Drawing on the theoretical framework of postphenomenology and its investigations into human-technology interaction, the study focuses on the developments of audience participation, and of an 'intimate listening space' in this long-running program. The method used in the study is content analysis, where 144 hours of radio from the program are coded for elements such as changes in forms of interaction, topics or talk/music ratio.

The study finds that a maturation of radio interactions gradually takes place. There are significant changes in both interaction content and form, and these changes are often audience-driven. Another finding is that youth interactions in Danish radio precede those of social networks like Facebook today, with radio listeners updating each other on relationship status, moods and thoughts, receiving answers in next week's messages.

Finally, the study debates whether the affinity for intimate messages and interactions between audience and radio hosts in 'P4 i P1' can be described as a characteristic of radio as a medium.