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:

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, SFMOMA Part of 2012 ZERO1 Biennial