Radio is the biggest medium in Denmark. Eighty-five per cent of all Danes over the age of 12 use radio daily, and the average Dane has his or her radio turned on over three hours each day. 1 But, strangely enough, even though radio is used often and long hours, it does not make much of an impression in the consciousness of its users. Radio is a socalled secondary medium. It plays in the background while we do all kinds of other things (work, eat, clean the house, drive the car, etc.). Radio "is

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... just there" -as takenfor-granted and regular a phenomenon as electric lights, water out of the tap, telephones and traffic lights. It is something we normally do not talk about, nor do we think much about radio in our everyday lives. Only when the receiver breaks down or disappears. The secondary status of the medium in our lives makes it difficult to find out how people make use of radio. Of course, it does provide a lot of information which keep the listener abreast of happenings in society at large (news, weather reports, top ten lists, background information of vaious kinds, etc.), but radio as a source of information only covers the kind of uses when the radio is in the foreground of the user's consciousness. It does not cast light on the greater part of radio use, that which takes place when radio is in the background -the kind of use when we "hear" the radio rather than "listen" to it. In this article I will offer some ideas about the functions radio may serve as a background medium, functions that are not directly related to, or dependent on the content the medium offers, but which rather have to do with its regularity and ability to set the mood. I wish to discuss whether, and in what ways, radio use is a ritual. Not the kind of ritual that surrounds notable events like moon landings, royal weddings, solar eclipses, and inaugurations of bridges, but the small rituals which take place in seemingly uneventful everyday life. There are many such rituals, and I shall argue that radio is involved in many of them. My starting point is not that radio use itself is a ritual, but that the presence of radio and its sounds in various social situations help transform day-to-day activities into rituals. Rituals which integrate the participant(s) (the (user(s) of radio) into a social and cultural order which transcends the time and space of the particular situation.