I know there are a few phrases and things that we still use which likely are hold overs from radio ("Stay tuned!"). But more so, I'm curious to know if there are more subtle remnants of the radio era - perhaps in how it shaped media companies, the entertainment businesses, entertainment law, cultural conventions like speech or pronunciation, or just how we communicate in general?
If radio was the first great electric mass media, are it's genes still evident in it's descendents?
At least in terms of technical innovations and corporate history, the radio era has never really gone away.
Guglielmo Marconi gets the credit for inventing radio (well, wireless telegraphy). He founded a company in the United Kingdom, the Marconi Company, to produce spark-gap wireless telegraphs.
During WWI, its American subsidiary, the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America, gets taken over by the federal government for war work.
After the war ends, the pieces held by the US government are sold to Thomas Edison's electrical goods company, one General Electric. GE now owns a controlling share in the new Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
RCA builds the world's first broadcast network, named the National Broadcast Company (NBC). As NBC acquires multiple stations in a given market, it needs to split its programming; NBC splits into two networks, designated by color -- NBC-Red and NBC-Blue. RCA is ordered by the Supreme Court to divest NBC-Blue, which renames itself to ABC (the American Broadcasting Company.)
Along the way, RCA also invents color television, makes major strides in radio and TV broadcasting, and tries its hand at building computers. Its engineers devise a protocol called "NTSC" that define scan line rates and refresh rates for analog television; the frame and line rates the monitor you are using to read this are still compatible to that standard.