Benkler and Nick Carr battled out this exact debate (radio as social media) back in 2006:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/jason_calacanis.php

Benkler sez:

“Throughout this period [1920’s] they [RCA, GE, ATT, etc] manuvered with
Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, to regulate the airwaves
so as to shunt the amateurs onto what were thought unusable short
waves, and to crowd all the nonprofit and almost all the
non-patent-pool stations into a single narrow channel, while
reserving separate channel allocations for stations that could afford
expensive broadcast stations and live performers. Amateurs were
prohibited from broadcasting news, or recorded music, etc.

“To say that this process represents an instance in which ‘that
nonprofessional network was soon displaced by a smaller set of
commercial radio stations that were better able to fulfill the
desires of the listening public’ is, shall we say, not the only way
to characterize that story.”