arguments to cameras and requiring justices to adhere to the same code of ethics that other federal judges follow. >> to supreme court decisions affect all americans. all americans are aware of the third branch of government and in the last 10, 15 years the branch of government has become so powerful. the idea that issues on voting and marriage and health care and immigration and women's rights pregnancy discrimination -- i can go on and on. these issues maybe 20, 30 years ago, congress and the executive branch would get together and figure out a compromise. that doesn't really happen anymore. the buck stops with the supreme court in a way that i feel has not happened before in our history. the court is making impactful decisions in our lives. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span's "q&a." >> up next on american history

tv, broadcast historian and communications professor paddy scannell. he argues that sound is as important in film -- as film in capturing history. he was a keynote speaker at a conference in conjunction with the radio preservation task force. this is about an hour and a half. ms. mcauliffe: national and international outrage is a newly created division of the library of congress that pulls together into one unit, all of the externally facing programs of the library. we started on october 1, so we are at startup mode at this point. the library is delighted to host today's session and sees this conference as an important step in the library punish mission of helping to preserve america's cultural mission.

staff members tell me the near includes canada and that the far includes australia. that is quite a span. there are around 100 organizations represented, with many more individual serving as research associates for this project. we at the library of congress are genuinely grateful for all the enthusiasm, planning, and the effort that has brought this about. we knew that radio has played a vital role in the last 100 years of our history. there are more than 14,000 radio stations in the united states. from the mid-1920's until the 1950's, radio was the preeminent source for entertainment and news information.

it was an irreplaceable part of our sociocultural heritage and a key part of our social memory. many libraries and archives have acquired -- recordings, but there have been few systematic efforts to collect commercial radio broadcasting and document and preserve the entire range of broadcast in public and private collection. luckily, now there is an initiative to preserve public radio and television. that still leaves the vast expanse of commercial and independent nonprofit radio that is found at the national and local levels. as you all know much better than i do, radio preservation presents unique challenges.

the magnitude of the material produced and its ephemeral nature. so much was never captured, or if recorded, has disappeared due to neglect. ownership of radio itself has changed frequently, especially following deregulation in the 1990's and preservation efforts have suffered. the library of congress released the national sound bank that produced several influential reports as well as a landmark study in 2010. one of the 80 or so recommendations found in the plan was a charge to establish a subcommittee to develop strategies and tools to collect and preserve radio broadcast

content. it went on to say, and i quote among the subcommittee's pot first action should be the convening of a symposium -- subcommittee's first action should be the convening of a symposium. well, here we are, and i hope this will be a productive day for all of you. thank you very much for being here. [applause] mr. sterling: as is often true of people who have the desk in the building, jane will have to move on and do library things. three people have been the primary players in putting this together. is josh shepherd in the room? wave your hand again. [applause]

i think the real name of this operation is josh's army. a lot of you are here because of josh. the majority of you are here for his effort in pulling together researchers from around the country and beginning to get the radio preservation task force off the ground. the third person, and there are many others. their acknowledgment's are towards the end of the program. the third person who has been the program head, the program director, is michelle helms. i should note about michelle and josh and me. we all share a madison wisconsin, background. [applause] josh and i both got our doctorates in madison, admittedly a few years apart. michelle retired just last year, i think, and you had been there two decades? a little more. has just retired, and i am talking with michelle because i

need to learn about that retirement thing, which i have not done very well. i am at g.w. and taught for a period of five years. thought i was retired and was asked by the dean to come back as an associate dean. it's about time to hang this up. this gets overdone. as you will see, over the coming two days we have put together a very eclectic program with a lot people coming from very different parts of the industry. where we are like and don't have enough people, though we tried is more people from the commercial side of the business.

we have lots of people in public broadcasting. hooray. that is great and important. we don't have a look from the commercial side. a lot of that is deregulation, changing ownership of the station. the first thing the owner does when walking in the door is chuck the history because they cannot figure out how to monetize it. if we had been sitting in this room and doing what we are doing two decades ago, just before the 1996 telecommunication act, i think we would have had a better chance of finding things which sadly, since then, have disappeared. let me turn this over to introduce our keynote speaker. the me turn this over to michelle. michelle? [applause] ms. hilmes: so nice to see the people in this room, because it has been a long process of bringing people together e-mailing.

i feel i have communicated with everyone in this room. i don't know what you look like. thank you for being here. i want to say thanks so much to josh, whose efforts have pulled this conference together in so many ways. i think that chris tends to be modest about his own role and competence. i have to say, and i am sure most of you know this, that talk about someone who wrote the bible on american broadcasting history. "stay tuned." how many of us have that on our shelves? i'm sure the vast majority. also bringing us here. i don't want to throw these words like washington insider around lightly, but you have certainly been here. [laughter]

here you are heading up the task force. am i allowed to say something about the national recording preservation board and your new position as director? [applause] anyway, it is really a fortuitous coming together of so many things. i will introduce our speaker in a moment because i know we want to get to this, but thank all of you. this program is your effort. all the people who are on the task force, program committee, put together workshops submitted papers, agreed to chair caucuses. thank you all for doing this. i am looking forward to seeing what comes out of the next few days. when we were thinking about a keynote speaker at the conference, and we are delighted to have so many keynote speakers, we all agreed immediately that we could not

think of a person we would rather invite to be our opening -- let me try that again, our opening keynote address speaker then professor paddy scannell. he was one of the pioneers of radio studies and media history. he is a great influence on my own work. in the early 90's when i was starting to write about american broadcasting history, i was looking for a model. it was his book which came out in 1991 which was a huge influence. this is the kind of history that i want to write. i want to say it is the kind of history that all of us here today would say it is why we are here. it is a book that said radio history -- or broadcasting history is not just about the march of networks, not just about business tightening, not just about technology, but it's about the way that broadcasting has become integral and into the

dna of our culture, our society, of our lives, everyday experience. it is what makes radio such an integral part of our cultural heritage and why it has grown to be what it is. we are finally getting recognition that it is so preserved to be studying this medium that we are studying today. we are finally beginning to preserve it. i give patty complete credit for this whole thing. i really do. it was a wonderful book. he has done more, which i will explain in a moment. paddy scannell joined the department of communication at the university of michigan in 2006. he had already spent 30 years building one of the first undergraduate degree in media studies in the u.k. at the university of westminster, london.

he is a founding editor of the journal of media, culture, and society which began publication in 1979 and is still going strong. his works not only include a social history of british broadcasting, but another one, broadcast talk. it is an edited volume that came out in the 1990's. it is a compilation of work. radio, what is it? it is talk. what kind of talk? very influential book. another one, radio television and modern life in 1996, which theorized the way media is integrated into the structure of everyday life. some people, having done all that, would be slowing down. in the early 2000's, patty announced that he was about to embark upon a trilogy of new works, three works that build upon each other, and by gosh, he

has done it. the third is underway. the first volume came out 2007 was hailed as a magisterial overview of the development of thinking about the media from the 1930's to the present day. the second volume, television and the meaning of life, came out in 2014 and it has been called a brilliant and provocative look that enriches and deepens our understanding of the central role of broadcasting. the third volume has the provocative title, "love and communication." i am anxiously waiting for that would. someone wrote a book called "sex and television." what was it called? "sex and broadcasting." that is a catchy title.

i think that "love and communication" maybe more so. given his pioneering leadership in the field, there is no one better suited to open our conference this week and then paddy scannell. please welcome him. [applause] prof. scannell: [laughter] thank you very much, michelle, for that wonderful, if not slightly intimidating introduction. i am already beginning to feel that i am a hard act to follow. [laughter] all i can say, people, is i will give it a go. one of the things that i loved many years ago, when you get invited to do something like this, is always check the small print.

i got an invitation about 30 years ago to give a keynote in italy at the invitation of the italian public broadcaster. they said it is a conference about radio documentary. i said, yeah, i can do that. i did know something about radio documentary. until i actually got there, and the evening before i was about to stand up to do what i'm about to do now, they said, you know it's about the short-form documentary, don't you? no, i didn't. and actually, i'd never even heard of short-form documentary.

i thought it was going to be talking about what i do know about, the beginnings of what i think we would have to call long-form documentary. this is a gathering from all over europe of people working in radio were particularly interested in a new, off on guard genre of 92nd documentary. -- avant-garde genre of 90-second documentary. [laughter] i found myself saying, i am privileged to be talking to you about the short-form documentary and, i'm going to start with the longform documentary. [laughter] i went on from there. you may be wondering what that has to do with today. when i bumped into josh, you know, who along with michelle kindly invited me to come and do this, i bumped into him about

6:00 yesterday evening and i said, high, josh, we chatted a bit. i said, by the way, i am only talking for 20 minutes, or type? and he looks at me and says, no, no, you're talking for 45 minutes. i had again that sinking feeling. [laughter] check the small print. what i want to say, folks, is that this, i had produced, if you would like, a short-form talk only to discover that i was doing a long-form talk. so if there are lots of pauses and meaningful silences -- [laughter] i hope you will forgive me. on the good side of this, we might finish a bit earlier than usual, which is not a characteristic feature of events like this. with that in mind, let me start.

i assume that all of us -- i think i am speaking to, as it were, three audiences. i'm talking to people interested in and working in archives sound archives, i am talking to people working in radio and in the radio industry, and i am talking to colleagues like myself who have a long time passion for the study of radio broadcasting. as i see it, what i want to talk about, hopefully are the things that unite us all. michelle mentioned that my third book is indeed going to be called "love and communication,"

and i am assuming that what all of us have in common is a love of radio. it always occurs to me to say, yes, i love radio, and it never occurs to me to say i love television. i found myself thinking about why that might be. i partially hope that in terms of what i have to say about radio, is that it might explain what it right mean to say, as i think we do, that we love radio. what it is about radio that has this distinctive and special quality. what i want to talk about our two related things that, as it were, bring us together at this occasion.

as for the question of radio itself, i will try to address the question of what is radio as such, and in relation to this, the underlying question of the sound archive and the question of the recording of radio. much of what i have to say is about what i am doing now, namely, talking. what you are doing now, namely listening to me and hearing me. i would like to start on reflecting on the intimate relationship on hearing and listening. they are not the same thing.

we say things like "it is not the same thing to say i hear the radio as it is to say i listen to the radio." it is not the same thing to say that i see the television and i watch television. they are different, but related things. when we say i hear the radio, i think what that means is in ordinary usage that i have come into the house and i realized that i left the radio on and i hear the radio as i come in. it is not the same as listening. but what i do think, and what underlies much of what i have to say is that what we listen to in radio is what people are saying. we listen to the content of their speech.

what we hear and what you are hearing now as you are listening to what i am saying, what you are hearing is my voice. it is these two things that are intimately connected in the power of radio as a medium and the experience of listening. i will be exploring the relationship between hearing and listening in relation to radio itself. then i want to reflect on, again, what it is that we hear when we listen to recordings of radio programs. i will also be speaking to, and michelle has suggested historical radio. british and american.

in what i think of as the classic, or the golden era of radio, before television came along and displaced it as the dominant, taken for granted medium in everyday life for whole populations as it was for the people of america and britain in the 1930's and the 1940's. it begins to be superseded by television in the postwar decade. so, my overall theme is what i shall be trying to reflect on, the gift of the archive and the meaning of the gift, which

invites us to think about that which is given and given by and large and by virtue of its gift, is very largely taken for granted by us when we listen to the radio and hear the voices that speak to us and also that sing to us and for us. i'm going to start with the experience of listening to the radio. i'm going to take as my beginning point the thought of some radio listeners back in 1942, here in the united states,

and their experience of listening to a very famous american broadcaster, kate smith. i am taking the data for what i have to say from a book that i am sure all academic historians already broadcasting have read robert martin's classic "mass persuasion," which was, as many of you will know, a study of the impact and effect of a marathon broadcast by kate smith, probably the most famous radio singer of her time in american broadcasting.

over the course of a very long day, she came to the microphone every 15 minutes for 16 hours or more to talk to listeners and to urge them to buy war bonds. she did it so successfully that at the end of the day, people had rung in and bought war bonds to the tunes of $40 million, which was a staggering figure for that time. the question that perplexed murphy, the sociologist from the sociology department of columbia university, one of whom found the bureau for radio research, what on earth was it about her that produced this magical effect?

i'm going to start with what listeners said about their experience of listening to kate smith and her broadcast. here is what they said. this is a selection of quotations from the book. she was speaking straight to me. you would think she was a personal friend. i feel she is talking to me. it seems that she is sitting in your kitchen and talking to you, the way it would be with a friend. she is spontaneous. her speech is not forced. it is natural. it makes me feel i am talking to my neighbor over the wash line. this in spite of the fact that what kate smith was saying was in fact, scripted, and listeners new that they were listening to scripted talk.

martin notes and accounts for this effect as cumulative. through this day, there was reciprocal interplay from the audience, who not only responded to smith, but she was responding to the audience and modifying subsequent remarks as a result. so, and this is the key, martin notes, the usual scripted monologue became something of a conversation in spite of the fact it was scripted and in spite of the fact that listeners new this, and yet smith, as if she was speaking in her own voice, not as the mouthpiece of others. when others say something, you know it's what their agent has written down.

with kate smith, she talks just what she thinks. the keyword that captures how she was heard by most listeners was sincerity. this is in effect of not what she says nor whether it is scripted or not, but of how she says it. listeners to her believe in the sincerity of what smith is saying because she sounds as if she believes in what she is saying in spite of the fact she is reading scripted words by others. as martin puts it there is a distinct and specific cause for their belief, and smith's genuine patriotism, patrons refer to her voice as genuinely sincere. it is her speech. when she asked for anything, she gives it everything she has got.

it is in her tone. it is hard to explain. she is sincere. it is in her tone. no matter what she says, you sit there and listen. she talks as if she herself is going through all that. what she said, she really felt herself. you knew she wasn't just reading a script. this is the upshot of what the data disclosed that listeners believed in smith because they heard in her voice that she meant the words that she was herself reading. they got on the phone and did what she asked them to do to the tune of $40 million to the american war effort. i had not read "mass persuasion" some years ago when i was working on one of the books that michelle kindly mention in her

introduction, "radio television and modern life." it came out in 1996. in it, i had a chapter about a very famous british wartime singer called vera lynn. vera lynn produced the same effect for british listeners for -- as a singer. they heard her when she sang at the microphone as genuinely sincere, that she meant, as it were, the words that she saying in the same way that american listeners heard kate smith. as a singer, too, i might add, but on this particular occasion, as a speaker, they heard her as

sincere. vera lynn, her most famous program was called "sincerely yours, vera lynn." it was a combination of vera lynn talking, scripted, reading scripted, but it was conversational, in a program in which she sang, so to speak, the representative of all the girls back home speaking to all the boys over abroad in many parts of the world on the various fighting fronts at that moment in the second world war. it is a sad fact that the discipline of sociology did not exist in england at this time, so we have no sociological

studies of the impact of this very famous british wartime broadcaster. but we do have the responses of the daily press of the day, and they were unanimous. it is not only her fresh, young voice, but, there is no other word for it, it is her sincerity. it is not only the completely natural, unstudied quality of her singing that reaches out to people's hearts, there is no other word for it -- it is sincerity. i was intrigued by this. you could not explain this sudden outbreak of sincerity at the microphone in two different countries at exactly the same

time as the effects of some mysterious process of cross-pollination across the atlantic. i came to the conclusion that in order to explain, first of all the perception of sincerity as a distinctive feature on radio and also a deep appreciation of it that the way to understand it was that it was an effect of technology. it was, in fact, an effect of the microphone. all tele-technologies, to

borrow a phrase from jack parador, i want to flag in advance this is not the narrative you think it is. it is not the dreaded author of gramatology, that we all found intolerable when it came out. it is a much later version before his death in 2004. i just want to flag that he is an underlying inspiration of what i am working towards. i do not want this to be too off-putting for you at this point.

people who hate darador are free to leave at this moment. teletechnologies have pragmatic functions that manage the scope and scale of their use. the microphone is a device for the amplification of sound and as such, has implications for the social proxemics of the human voice in action. all radio output is reducible to two basic categories -- music and talk. the microphone has profound consequences for the way the human voice is deployed as it speaks or sings in front of it. music is the easiest way of filling airtime. from the start to the present, most of radio consists of music

of one sort or another. in britain, in the very early years of radio broadcasting, when singers came into the radio studio to perform at the microphone, it was immediately discovered that they needed to stand six or eight feet away from the microphone because if they didn't, they would blast the eardrums of listeners and short-circuit the equipment. singing in public at that time required voices capable of filling a large auditorium whether an opera house or a music hall, without the use of any technology to amplify the sound produced by the singer. i am profoundly aware of these two funny little black things that are less than a foot away

from my mouth as i speak. until radio came along, all performers in public, all singers, learn to pitch their voices loud and strong. these techniques developed over the course of the 19th century as the venues for performance, certainly of opera, grew larger. larger auditoriums and much bigger orchestras, and learning to, as it were, to project your voice over a full orchestra and to a large opera house required a very special technique. the microphone transforms the proxemics, that is to say the social space and social relations, of singing.

in the 1930's, singers at the microphone discovered that they could stand close to it and lower their voice and thereby produce a quite different experiential effect for listeners. the new technique of close mic singing was developed in the usa and britain at the same time. it was called crooning at the time. it was not exactly a term of endearment on either side of the atlantic, and it was a style of singing that was, to begin with, controversial in britain and here in the united states. i think i want to say that what is true of the social relations of singing in public, as it were, were transformed by the microphone.

there was much debate about whether or not a real singer would use a microphone to perform in public. if you think about miking up the performers at the met in new york, this would produce shock and horror all around. there was much objection. two early singers who use the microphone, they did not have good voices. they had weak voices that needed the artificial support of the microphone rather than people realizing it just produces an entirely different kind of singing, a different relational experience between singer, song, and listener. it is also true of social

relations in respect of public talk before radio came along. i ask myself the question, what was talk in public? here in the united states or in the united kingdom? it seems to me that it largely consisted of what we have here -- a speaker and an audience in a defined public space. public speakers, the three characteristic genres that come to mind immediately are what i'm doing now, a lecture, or the sermon, or the political rally. these were the most familiar forms of public discourse in the early decades of the 20th century. in all of them, a public speaker addresses the crowd. each has a distinctive performative rhetoric, a style of speaking that marked it as a

lecture, as a sermon, as a political harangue to abuse the opposition and rally the faithful, and we have plenty of examples of them right in this moment in this country. in all these cases, it is a one-to-many form of address, when a public speaker -- i'm not speaking to you individually or personally now. i am addressing you as a mass. it is a form of mass communication. radio transformed the notion of talk in public. the two allowed an impersonal voice of the speaker into the voice of someone speaking as a

person and speaking to others as persons, too. this was the effect that produces the sincerity effect of the listeners to kate smith. they heard her speaking to them as a person. in each case, each listener heard kate smith as if she was speaking to him or herself personally. i have long thought that this is a very distinctive and peculiar form of communication. i wrote a paper with a hideously clunky title called "for anyone and someone's structure" some years ago. what i was trying to get at is everybody, when they are listening to the radio or watching television knows that millions and millions of people are at the same time listening to what they are listening to or watching.

everybody knows this, and yet everybody hears it in their own situation, in their own circumstances, as if it speaks to me. it speaks to me as someone, and as the same time, i know that it speaks to everyone, someone, everyone as someone. it seems to me that there are two kinds of what i want to call care structures in broadcasting. there is a technological care structure, and there is a production of care structure. the production care structure attends to the management of what it is that we hear as we listen to the radio.

i would like to reflect on what it is and say a little bit more about what we hear in the human voice as it speaks at the microphone. we hear many things all at once. voice reveals the age and sex of the speaker. it tells us where the speaker comes from. it tells us something of that social class. perhaps tells us something of their age. above all, what we here in the human voice as it speaks or sings is the animus, the soul of another human being. in the animation of the human voice as it speaks, we hear the being of the speaker animated and brought to life.

it is not an effect of what is being said, but of the way it is being said. it is the brain of the voice revealing how it is with us in our very being as we speak. perhaps against the grain of what it is that we are saying, so that our voice may sound tired, edgy, excited, and much more. what we are hearing in the voice is how it is with the speaker in the very moment of the enunciatory moment, the present moment. we hear it in the immediate present moment. it is a question of hearing and listening. we can all talk to each other in

non-institutional, everyday setting, but the production of talk at the microphone requires a considerable degree of preparation and management whether scripted or unscripted. it is not a natural thing, talking into a microphone in a broadcasting studio. most radio was studio-bound. in the studio, the anxieties of live performance are always present. it is a scary thing, folks doing what i am doing now, as any performer knows. any performer experiences stage fright at the thought of standing up in front of a bunch of strangers who are staring at him or her, as you are looking

at me right now -- [laughter] prof. scannell: and far more famous performers than me have literally frozen at the thought of going on and doing it live on stage in the theater. it is interesting to google stage fright and see the names. the most famous actors and singers. barbra streisand, for one, very famously froze in the middle of a live performance and could not do it for 20 or 30 years. let me reflect on the terror that haunts live performance. of course, it lies in the fact that if something goes wrong there is no escape from it. it is immediately obvious and visible. you cannot hide it.

it is not like writing. it is not like the movies, where you can endlessly retake the same shot, if you love it. i don't know if you have seen "hail caesar!," but it has some ripe examples of, who is more famous than george clooney? forgetting his lines and flubbing the shot up, and the other wonderful scene of coaching the cowboy to say, "it isn't." by ralph fiennes. i digress. as i said, digression is part of my business of filling in a little time. [laughter] prof. scannell: that i had unaccountably not taken into account in my preparations for

my performance. so, one of the key things that i have learned, and my most recent book "television and the meaning of live," which is about doing it live, live radio and television is the management of liveness in ways that negatively are concerned with damage limitation. that is to say, anticipating the possibility of technical failure and performative mistakes on the one hand, and on the other hand,

there is crucially the positive commitment to, and i can't think of a better way of putting it, to bringing it to life. the liveness of radio and of television is not an effect of the technology. the effect of the technology is immediacy. the effect of liveness is the human input that brings the event to life in such ways hopefully as to engage the attention and enthrall the audience for whom the live performance is being proposed. i mention this quite simply because one of the key things, i think in understanding the development of radio, certainly in the united kingdom, was the gradual letting go of scripted

talk at the microphone. i think it is true to say that just about everything that was broadcast by the bbc before world war ii was, in fact, scripted. this had two benefits. one, it gave the broadcasters total control of everything that was said at the microphone. it was a form of institutional control and, in fact censorship. if they did not like what you are going to say. they were always scared that people might just go off script and say something they were not supposed to. negatively, it was a form of control. on the other hand, it functioned as a safety net for speakers and

it minimized the manifest and manifold anxieties involved in speaking at this strange inhuman thing here, the microphone. let me begin to draw together the implication of these matters in relation now to the question of recording and the question of the archive and what it is that we hear when we have access to the data in the sound archive. again, the question is how to listen to and hear the historical data that the archive contains. all recording technologies are

one way or another, a sinequanon of history. no recording technology, no history, for history is first and last a matter of record. it was a slightly haunting thought for me as an early historian of radio broadcasting that what i was doing was a kind of archaeology as much as a history, because there was no record of the output of the bbc at all in the 1920's because they did not have the recording equipment to, as they used to say in those days, to bottle programs. and so, i found myself, for instance, reconstructing the origins of radio news without

ever knowing what, in fact, a single news broadcast sounded like. the first recording, to the best of my knowledge, in the bbc sound archives of a full radio broadcast is from the infamous day in september 1938, when neville chamberlain, the british prime minister, came back with a scrap of paper promising peace in our time, having negotiated a wholly bogus, as he thought, deal with hitler in munich. the question of technologies of recording is one that is deeply fascinating, and i know that many of you are interested in

and knowledgeable of the history of sound recording. i obviously do not want to begin to get into that here. i do want to make one fundamental observation about the recording device, all recording devices. the key thing that i want to say is recorded is not the opposite of live. [laughter] prof. scannell: my time is up or my number is up, sorry. i've got to take it. i am always overwhelmed, jack darador always said, when i hear the voice of someone who is dead, as i am not, when i see a photograph or image of a dead person.

i can be touched presently by the recorded speech of someone who is dead. i can hear and be affected by a voice beyond the grave. for darador, the recording of the voice is, in his own words one of the most important phenomena of the 20th century. it gives a living presence the possibility of being there a new that is without equal and without precedents. the defining ontological characteristic of the human voice as it speaks or sings is liveness it has to be brought to life in ways that i have yet to

show, but talk dies in the announcement of its enunciation. how shall it be known what is spoken? for you shall speak into the air. these are the famous words of st. paul's epistle to the corinthians and the title of the book on the history of the idea of communication "speaking into the air," in which john takes as two paradigms of communication. each of these two paradigms of communication is a paradigm of love. communication as dialogue, in the example of socrates and the

phaedrus, a conversation about love between socrates and a younger male friend. against that, the paradigm of communication as dissemination. communication not as one-on-one, reciprocal communication as dissemination. this is the model for jesus' practice as a teacher and as he expanded it famously in the parable of the cellar, in which jesus offers us a discourse on his message and as a teacher. the scary thing of our tqaalk,

and in the words of one of the early practitioners of radio in the u.k., it is impermanent -- impermanent. the fastly impermanence of the medium, as a early pioneer of radio in the u.k. once put it. death and resurrection. time and time again. whenever we play a reply, the soundings of the sound archive. i am open to your comments and thoughts. i have thought about this, and i want to say, the voices that we hear when we press the play

button are not ghosts that return to haunt us. voices mark a presence that no visual image could ever equal. voice, aces, -- he says, has real presence. this is from the person who spent his time telling us about the metaphysics of presence, which sound recorders capture store, and reproduce. resurrection from the dead is no longer an impossible miracle nor is real presence a metaphysical conceit to be deconstructed as a younger author of grandma collagen --

grammartology did. sound recordings are not a face of the past, like a photograph. as it was poignantly argued, a memento moray, a moment that has vanished forever. the faded photograph haunts us. cinema, speeding up photography to 24 frames per second, needed music to animate it's music images to bestow life on them. movies can to life when the became the talkies. likewise, the television. it is sound, not vision, that brings television to life for all of us. it would be absurd, a meaningless experience, to watch a game of soccer or football on

television with the vision on and the sound off. that is why it is a basic mistake that television studies distinct from radio studies, tends to fall into a thinking of television as a visual medium. it isn't. it is not a visual medium like painting or photography, which are purely visual, nor in any close way like cinema. which was a purely visual medium with sound added later. television is the reverse. television is, as we know, the offspring of radio. it brings vision as added value to its parent medium of sound. sound before vision. audio visual. television without sound is meaningless.

the power of television's vocal -- television is vocal. i will move to my conclusion with a line from samuel taylor, the last line of his beautiful conversational problem this lined tree bow, my prison. taylor is imagining his friends returning home from a walk into the countryside as dusk falls and as the ropes lie creaking overhead before they settled into the trees overnight. the final line is, no sound is dissonant which tells of life. i cannot agree with keats that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard of, sweeter.

those famous lines are from his ode to a grecian urn. the ode to a grecian urn might just as well be called an ode to a photograph. it is an ode to what we see, not what we hear. we need an ode to a nightingale for that. death was not born, but immortal burned. the voice i hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by the emperor. bbc's radio 4, that great national talk radio station national treasure for the british middle-class as npr is over here, recently ran a whole

year, monday to friday, a tweet of the day just before the 6:00 morning news. in 90 seconds, a british bird was interviewed by an expert with the legendary david attenborough talking about the cuckoo and a recording of its song. an o-bard, if you like. puresound. i am running out of time, i feel. and i am certainly running out of words to capture what i think is so new and unique about sound archives. they are proof that life itself can be archived. this, i want to suggest, is

there miraculous gift. thank you very much. [applause] >> [inaudible] >> sure, questions comments, sure. >> [inaudible] >> the thing that we all need, of course.

>> i was just -- i can also speak loudly. hello? testing. >> [inaudible] >> really, what i have to say does not speak to the deaf community. >> i am wondering if you have any thoughts on sound quality

making choices of quantity over quality. these are practical decisions given the size of our collection but should we be thinking that we are sacrificing too much to get a lot through. are we losing the quality you described as "what we hear, as opposed to what we listen to."? >> that is an interesting question. i will bracket the question as the quality of the sound, if i may. there are things that i like to listen to where the actual quality of the recording itself is not so great. the question of what is worth

preserving. it haunts any archival question. i myself think increasingly, that what we want as a record for future generations is that they will be able to hear what it was like for the people of the dead, from the generations of the dead, what it was like experientially for people living at any time. my general thought would be, a sound archive is not going to be defined byt the voices of the famous. by the voices just of politicians, academics, or artists, and intellectuals

celebrities, and so forth. i think the quality of any national archive is going to be dependent on the extent to which the archive contained the every day experiences thoughts and so forth, of all members of -- in the context of national archives, of the international community. i like that npr regularly does a little bit of talk between two people usually family members sharing an experience, and this is being archived in the national archives. i very much think that a national archive must have this kind of material as its bedrock.

>> in our era when the definition of radio seems so much to be changing or challenged, i am curious to hear yours since we read about pandora, iheart radio, a proliferating plethora of technology platforms available that many in traditional radio argue that it is not. how do you define it amidst these changes? paddy: you've got me on a cleft here. i think i will answer as a brit, rather than an american. i will speak to my experience of british radio. i hope this is an answer to your

question. i think that national radio broadcasting systems radio broadcasting is crucially important, as distinct from all other ways of having access to radio content through podcasts, so on and so forth. what is distinctive about broadcasting -- i still do not think it is properly understood. there is a hideous tendency to think that television is just about content. that is all we talk about. but in relation to radio and television broadcasting, what matters is that all broadcasting is live to air. that is to say, it is live and in real-time, through the day from day-to-day, all day and

every day. it is only in this way through the incremental silent, endless repetition says that we wake up in the morning, and we listen to morning edition, as i always do. i come home every day, here in the united states, and i listen to on point. hear in the u.k. -- here in the u.k., when i am cooking at 7:00, you had bet i will have radio 4 on listening to the archers and that is what every decent middle-class person -- [laughter] i do not pull my punches. it is about the embeddedness of a service adjusted to the structures and routines of

everyday life itself. here in the united states, and in britain specifically on national radio programs, there are programs that are well run in britain that have been running without interruption for 50 years or more. you live with them, and grow old with them. i have been listening to the archers -- "the archers" is 60 years old. it is a radio broadcast that observes real-time. that is to say the time in the program is the same as the time in which listeners are listening. where fictional characters grow old and die at the same age as listeners grow old as well. i hope that is something of an answer to what i say are the

enduring qualities of broadcasting as the most fundamental gifts of the technology of radio and broadcasting. there is a lot of talk about the end of broadcasting. i do not see it myself anytime soon. >> those of us who are trying to preserve audio history who come across a 16 inch teletr anscription that is in bad shape, should we make an effort to clean that up to make it sound better than the medium which it is on? paddy: [laughter] that is a great question. i do not, at this point, have an answer to it, that i would be interesting in having an opportunity to discuss that question.

later today, or possibly tomorrow. >> in the united states, in the 1920's and 1930's, there were a lot of articles that talk about radio announcing, and said specifically the words that you used, it is not so much what he said or how -- but how he said it. the argue -- article from the 1920's in favor of his rollicking style. [inaudible] there is a recording of sutton reading garland's article from 1930, and she did a diction program on nbc. then you have arthur godfrey.

godfrey in the 1930's, said exactly what you describe with kate smith. i have studied kate smith also. he was the anti-graham mcnamee. he said, when i was in the hospital for six months, i learned that i am listening to the radio alone in my room, and all of my listeners are generally in a room. i am not speaking to a vast audience, but one person. all of this was thought about even before the 1942 broadcast of kate smith. kate did a daily 15 minute noontime talk program. only about 10 of those programs exist. that is why it is not known.

she had done three to four years-worth of talking, not saying, to the radio audience before that program. paddy: i appreciate what you are saying, and thanks for that information. what i think -- what bears saying is that the thing that we now take for granted as if it were the most natural thing namely talk on radio, was something that had to be discovered, that people had to learn how to do it. it is a specific kind of performance. the most extraordinary thing is that talk literally is

prehistoric, until sound recording comes along. writing is as old as recorded history. thousands of years old, but how people talk, what talk sounded like, how people related to each other through speech, we do not know until radio and television came along. i wonder the extent to which the radio and television has contributed to helping us all to learn to talk to each other in new kinds of ways. it used to be said of television that it killed talk. i cannot think of a more idiotic thing to say about television. radio and television gave everybody things to talk about above and beyond their own

experience, in ways that hitherto had been simply impossible. >> we have a question in the back. our last one. >> maybe we should follow up and have a chat, but what you said got me thinking when answering the gentleman's question about what is radio. it resonates very much what you are saying about the real-time and the rhythm and experience of daily life, on the other hand what you described about the immediacy and sincerity of the voice over the radio, i feel a lot of the younger generation is experiencing that through the internet. personally i have a 19-year-old daughter who listens to these podcasts and experiences the same things of that the vacation and feeling connected with the voice -- of identification and feeling connected with the voice. i feel like her generation has

lost the magic of radio and is coming to the back door. paddy: i appreciate what you are saying, and i do not disagree. what i always feel about radio do the students listen to the radio? in my experience, they don't. but as they get older, they will. i have often thought that radio is a medium for grown-ups, in a serious kind of way. talk radio. i have to immediately reply what i have just said. talk radio means something different for me as a brit. it means radio 4. i realize that it means a quite different kind of thing over here. what i would like to say, in particular to the question of authenticity sincerity, is that

what i was trying to point out is that radio -- then reality television later, is grounded in reality. we should always remember that authenticity is something that can be faked. there is something as fake authenticity and a lot of american advertising appeals to some notion of the fake real. my experience with students is tha tthey -- that they are very sensitive to questions of authenticity sincerity, and someone -- and so on, but for the students all of these questions are posed by the q uite obvious fakeness, inauthenticity of everybody performing on "reality"

television. [applause] >> interested in american history tv? visit our website, c-span.org /history. american artifacts, road to the white house lectures, and more. >> monday night on "the communicators," a look at the fcc subsidy program and the effort to bridge the dividing line between lower and middle

income americans. the fcc is expected to take up the proposal in march. we will speak with two people. we are joined by brendan sasso national journal technology reporter. >> low income reporters need access to technology now. it is unclear to me that congress would be able to askpass a support directly aimed at low income users. this congress has not been particularly supportive of folks in poverty. the conversations on the hill has been hard to decipher. >> there is a sense where the fcc is putting the cart before the horse, they have not done a study to suggest that these are the factors keeping broadband from low income people.

we do not know if we need nine dollars a month for 10 million people or five dollars a month for 50 million people. the fcc has not done that level of analysis. >> watch "the communicators" monday night and 8:00 p.m. et on c-span2. washington post journalist bob woodward reflects on abraham lincoln's legacy and how it could affect other presidents including richard nixon, and barack obama. >> when he was a private lawyer in the 1850's, he was involved in a lawsuit where edwin stanton, the country's foremost lawyer was involved in this case in ohio. lincoln learned that stanton would speak very negatively about lincoln and call him privately a backwoods of can --

bumpkin. stanton was a democrat and later practiced law in washington and there was still this bad mouthing of lincoln the whole time. what did lincoln do? he appointed stanton secretary of war. it turned out that stanton was one of the best war chiefs that the united states ever had. after lincoln was assassinated, it was stanton who said, now he belongs to the ages. lincoln was able to bring people even enemies, close to him and use them for his purpose. >> bob woodward on a ram lincoln's -- on abraham lincoln's lasting legacy. this is american history tv,

only on c-span3. >> as the director of military and veteran affairs here in ohio many veterans have come to my office to talk about who they want to vote for, regardless if they want to vote him in chronic or republican, -- vote democratic or republican, it is your civic duty to get out and vote. >> we are in toledo, ohio, and i am here supporting bernie sanders. i feel he is one of the most important candidates in his field as he is the most viable alternative to mainstream politicians. he has the most progressive ideas that are most important to the country. i would encourage everyone to go support bernie if possible. >> the most important issue that

democrats feel is important in this election will be college tuition, as well as jobs. they need to know how they will pay for it, if they can afford it, as well as leaving college. what the job market will look like, who is bringing jobs back to the u.s.. as president of the college democrats, those are the two biggest issues. >> i was going to vote for bernie sanders but as i am not that politically inclined, i ended up voting for hillary because she seems more knowledgeable and has been involved in leadership before. she was secretary of state and has already seen the innerworkings of the white house and how the game goes. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. up