Broadcasting and schizophrenia

This article explores the peculiar ways that the practitioners and audiences of broadcasting had to learn to think about impersonal and interpersonal address, pushing media history into the rich and under-explored field of psychiatry. Each media format or technology implies its own communicative disorders. During the broadcast era, it became normal for media personalities to simulate interactive talk, but pathological for a member of the audience to hear their words as a personal response. Broadcast talk encoded an implicit line between madness and rationality. By exploring a number of notions from media theory, media history, and 20th-century psychiatry such as para-social interaction, for-anyone-as-someone structures, thought broadcasting, delusions of reference, and telepathy, this article explores the assumptions about the public and the private that once informed broadcasting but now may be fading in a digital era.