III. Sound as Media

2. Radio Culture

1. Radio as imagined community (Hilmes)

2. Radio as interface (Fickers)

3. Radio as not radio: sonic social technical communities online (Pinch & Athanasiades)

4. Radio as art (Amacher, Lozano-Hemmer)

Telefunken ad from 1957

Radio as imagined community:

• Benedict Anderson’s description of the modern print-influenced citizen // radio listener

• “Unity, connection, and communication in its purest sense.” (p. 352)

• Simultaneity of experience – without direct contact

• Exposure to the public – in the privacy of one’s home

• “Radio’s ‘immateriality’ allowed it to cross these boundaries: allowed ‘race’ music to invade the white middle-class home, vaudeville to compete with opera in the living room, risqué city humor to raise rural eyebrows, salesmen and entertainers to find a place in the family circle.” (p. 355)

• Radio’s power to unify the nation culturally – what national culture?

»Commercialism»Utopian discourse of uplift and

education»Dystopian fear of the popular»Vast audiences of women»Linguistic unity»Enforcement of cultural norms

Telefunken ads from the 1930s

Radio as interface:

• Mental mapping - the cognitive production of an individualized representation of experience space

• The ether (an imagined space)

• “The magic comes from entering a world of sound and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world.” (Susan Douglas quoted on p. 415)

• “Radioitis”—Schaudenken

• Emergence of a European radio infrastructure:

• Union International de Radiodiffusion/International Broadcasting Union (UIR/IBU) was formed in 1925

• IBU’s “ether police” (permanent Technical Center)

• The use of the frequency meter and calibrated station scale – the materialization of a regulatory regime (p.421)

• Superheterodyne circuit (“superhets” or “super”)

• Valundia system and Auto-Skala

• “Station scales, then, served as early atlases of globalization, and one may interpret the use of radio in the 1920s and 1930s as a symbolic appropriation of the European broadcasting landscape.” (p. 432)

Telefunken ad from 1969

Radio as not-radio (sonic technosocial communities online):

• An ethnographic study of ACIDplanet.com

• ACID turns the computer into a recording studio and enables users to make music, post/share, and review each other’s music

• Review system (comments and star-rating;

a “translation mode”) and contests (remixes and mash-ups)

• Users: provide most of the content, form a devoted community; more organic than regular file-sharing systems

• Public interaction – visible to all users

• Special sociotechnical instruments / scopic focusing technologies: allow users to focus on certain selected pieces of content

• Double sociality – economies of reputation

• Transduction

• New and old identities and systems - possibilities, problems, and contradictions

Comparative Analysis

In small groups, examine and discuss two online sites:

www.acidplanet.com

www.bbc.co.uk/radio

Consider these online spaces in relationship to the following ideas and issues from our study of radio culture:

• What kinds of communities do these sites create and foster?

• What kinds of mental mapping do their interfaces reflect?

• What kinds of identities and reputations do they produce for their users?

Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003)by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

November 2012 – February 2013, SFMOMAPart of 2012 ZERO1 Biennial