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The transformation of the broadcasting industry from the late 1940s to the early 1960s profoundly redefined the relationship between radio and literary cultures in the United States. This interstitial period in American radio, which saw the decline of the “golden age” of network radio and the rise of format radio, and which corresponded with the civil rights era that challenged the racism and segregationism of the culture industries, generated not only new forms of radio but also new ways of listening. Tracing the influence of the legendary jazz radio deejay “Symphony Sid” Torin on Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and other writers, this chapter examines how specific practices of radio listening—such as ambient listening—that mediated the Beat reception of jazz as a source of innovation and resistance to conformism are subverted in Baraka’s early work in ways that open radical possibilities of Black reception in and against Western discourses of aurality.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large-scale population shifts, urban-development projects, and new media transformed New York City in ways that were heard as much as seen. In this context, Langston Hughes and sound documentarian Tony Schwartz each experimented with techniques of montage to splice the sounds of their local New York neighborhoods. Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and Schwartz’s “New York 19” tape-recording projects locate a crisis in listening in New York’s postwar urban geography of race and economics. Although their projects differ in significant ways, both employ montage to expose listening as a mediated and socially constructed act often intertwined with the structural violence of racial and economic discrimination. In response, both develop alternative models of collective listening, which together offer contrasting perceptual strategies for remapping social, spatial, and sonic relations in the diverse and unequal urban geographies of the United States.

Die Bundesregierung verfolgt kommunikative Ziele immer haufiger unter Einsatz von Werbeinstrumenten. Was sind jedoch die spezifischen Eigenschaften dieses Kommunikationstools? Am Beispiel der Werbekampagne zur Novellierung des Urheberrechtsgesetzes des Bundesministeriums der Justiz wird deutlich, dass Regierungswerbung keineswegs nur ein passives Transportmittel fur politische Informationen darstellt, sondern durch seine Charakteristika politische Kommunikation ‹aktiv› verandert. Mit der Nutzung von Werbestrategien rucken sowohl Uberlegungen zur Zielgruppe, zur Strategie als auch kreative Aspekte in den Mittelpunkt der kommunikativen Bemuhungen. Der Einzug dieser drei Charakteristika in Regierungskommunikation wird aus den Zielen der Werbekampagne heraus begrundet und anhand der konkreten Konzeption und Umsetzung der Werbemasnahmen vorgestellt.