Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star – Transmediality Against the Notion of a “Blind Medium”. Doctoral Horizons

Abstract

This paper interrogates the persistence and transformation of the audio fiction format within the transmedial landscape of contemporary culture, challenging the recurrent notion of radio drama as a “blind medium.” Building on the theories of McLuhan, Baudrillard, Rajewsky, Wolf, and Jenkins, it argues that the significance of transmediality lies less in content migrating across platforms than in the collision and interplay of media themselves. The study considers both historical and contemporary case studies—from Orson Welles to the radio-pollinated war-time myth of Tokyo Rose completely shifting the trajectory of the living human being Iva Toguri - to the resurgence of fiction podcasts such as Welcome to Night Vale and The Amelia Project —to illustrate how audio narratives not only endure but thrive through transmedial relations, sometimes even breaching reality. Rather than being displaced by video or the internet, radio and its descendants have been revitalized within a globalized, syncretic media environment. By reframing radio drama within the dynamics of media fusion, the paper dismantles the reductive critique of its supposed blindness, demonstrating instead its capacity to generate multi-sensory, culturally resonant, and globally networked experiences. Ultimately, transmediality emerges not as a novelty of the digital age but as a constitutive principle of storytelling itself, wherein media perpetually reshapes itself.