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Transmitting Ideals: Constructing Self and Moral Discourse on Loveline
Author(s) -
Ferris Kerry O.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2004.27.2.247
Subject(s) - joke , anonymity , sociology , postmodernism , tone (literature) , subject (documents) , ideal (ethics) , aesthetics , social psychology , epistemology , psychology , linguistics , philosophy , law , computer science , political science , library science
Loveline is a late‐night radio advice show currently airing on progressive rock stations in the United States. Callers present their most intimate troubles to the show's DJ–doctor advice‐giving team, revealing themselves to an audience of faceless millions. I analyze three distinct interactional phases through which Loveline callers and hosts symbolically transform troubled selves: with each problem revealed, each embarrassing joke made, each specific recommendation given, a moral discourse is constructed. Loveline incrementally builds a distinctive way of conceptualizing right and wrong, closely tied to standards of a whole, happy, healthy selfhood. And while the notions of a moral discourse and an ideal self are fundamentally modern, Loveline 's distinctive combination of mass‐mediated anonymity, intimate subject matter, satiric tone, and fragmented interaction patterns conveys these modern concepts over the radio waves and into a postmodern world.