Chris Wilson

Office: EW202
Telephone: +61 3 9214 4446
Email: cwilson@swin.edu.au

Chris Wilson is a Phd student associated with the ISR's Youthworx: Youth Media and Social Enterprise project. After completing a Bachelor of Arts specialising in political and economic geography, he conducted social, economic and market research and planning for a range of public and private consultancies and media organisations. Recently, he spent time in the alternative and mainstream education sectors teaching English, politics, economics and history.

Topic

Frequently Modulating: Australian Radio's Relationship With Youth

In Australia, the rapid adoption of television in the late 1950s brought variety radio’s golden years to a close and forced a radical rethink of the medium’s commercial sustainability. What emerged in response was a relationship between radio, popular music and young people that would dominate metropolitan commercial radio broadcasting for three decades. In the 1980s this relationship began to break down and in 1988, when Melbourne’s 3XY shifted out of the Top-40 youth format, commercial youth radio was pronounced dead. But with little delay the connection between radio and youth was reinvigorated – this time in the public broadcasting sector, as the ABC’s Triple J youth network, and in the community broadcasting sector, following the licensing of seven ‘youth’ stations in 2001-02. What made it possible for such a fundamental commercial cultural practice to be articulated in these non-commercial sectors of the broadcasting landscape? On what basis was such a significant investment of cultural resources made? This thesis traces the processes through which a range of rationales were negotiated and assembled to form the conditions of possibility for noncommercial youth radio.

Candidacy

PhD

Supervisors

Professor Denise Meredyth and Professor Julian Thomas

Publications and Other Research Outputs

Go to Swinburne Research Bank