When voice recording began, was it speakers or their audiences that drove the new trend toward umless speech?
ME: The lines between speakers and audiences were considerably fuzzy…early adopters of the phonograph, for instance, could use their machines to listen and to record their voices, either in arcades or at home. As for radio, early broadcasters had small internal audiences of radiophiles, early adopters, and investors, all of whom became influential before socially and geographically wider audiences were built. So there was ample opportunity — there are decades between the invention of phonography and rise of commercial radio — for the seeds of a vague discomfort to be planted in small groups who both produced speech and listened to it, and who would ultimately create the standards at the same time they were adapting their own speech production. What emerged could be called a culture of dictation…that there should be a match, or coordination, between what one says and how that is written. This culture would have taken a while to emerge. EW: So who was behind this culture of dictati
