The Institutionalization of Radio: how does new technology become grafted onto existing culture?

Wireless technologies
Amorphous
Undeveloped and diverse possibilities

• e.g. wireless telegraph (coded messages)
• 2-way ham radio (~wireless telephone)
• one frequency (55meghertz) versus multiple frequencies
• hobbiest crystal and vacuum tube versus "radio box"
• receiving as an art versus easy as turning on appliance
• broadcasting (one powerful transmitter to many receivers)
• stand-alone versus local medium versus national network

Existing cultural ideologies, forms and practices

• The voice as the kernel of the self (phono-logo-centrism: it is in the voice that the self is most self-present to the self {Derrida: speech/ writing})
• Newspapers (print and telegraph) bring the news
• High Culture: Concerts, Theater,
• Popular culture: vaudeville; humor; melodrama; detective fiction; Western; etc.
• University knowledge practices
• Telephones for 2-way communication
• Phonograph
• Utilities (water, gas, electricity) serving appliances
• Movies (newsreels; feature film; )

What is happening in the middle space between the zones of "technology" and "existing culture", especially during the heady and feverish early days of radio?

Agents: inventors, investors, promoters, "operators," hobbiests, etc. engage in

• Science fiction thinking (dreaming the unheard of possibilities of the alien new technology)
• Make articulations (arbitrary connecting of two terms): this is the metaphoric work of those who would insitutionalize a new media form (a troping that makes a metanymic link between two terms [e.g. we could have political speeches heard by the entire nation; we could equalize access to elite culture;…]
• Promotion (hype, sales, 'visions' as ads for the future; bait and switch?)
• Speculations (conceptual {the "radioette" of Sarnoff} and economic; stocks rise and plunge; this 'changes everything'! / ? )
• Strategic and tactical decisions are made (that are social, economic, and political; they have consequences) [e.g. government steps in to regulate access to frequencies; but refuses the proposal to build a government network like the BBC]
• Media visionaries: David Sarnoff as "father of broadcasting"; as captain at the helm [~Bill Gates re pc]
  

If it works, if the graft of the new technologies to existing social and cultural practices "takes"

1. Out of a numberless set of possibilities for technology and culture, we have a new hybrid, a network of humans and non-humans, called "radio"
2. Behind this success are a large number of social decisions to 'buy'; practice; use = restructure life to include radio
3. After a feverish effort to institute radio (in the active sense) it becomes an institution [with a more or less determined structure: companies; ways of doing things-e.g. one to many broadcast stations with free content paid for by advertisers but developed for the most part by independent agents, with very weak government oversight] In US: a market underpins development of radio (in England a government agency, the BBC, takes the lead)
4. From very open-ended time of institution to a slower and more "evolution" of the media:
   e.g. Radio has changed form and social meaning profoundly over the last 80 years:

• 1) from the large consol in the living room (family entertainment; fireside chat)
• 2) the radio speaker (fascist radio; communist public radio; musak)
• 3) to car radio (beginning of popular music targeted to youth: top 40)
• 4) to portable radio (radio into nature: e.g. the beach movie)
• 5) to walkman (one exercise room, many different channels)
• 6) Internet radio (what are the social implications of this form?)

Conclusion: two related ideas that emerge from this way of representing the exchange between technology (the formation of objects like 'radio') and culture (the development of new human roles in relation to those objects)

1: That any categorical separation of new technology and larger culture is convenient and conventional, but at a deeper level, is simply mistaken. Technology does not have an exteriority to the humans that dream, fund, counter-sign its new place in the social system.

2: Instituting is non-inevitable: "Radio" does not exfoliate, in some "natural" or inevitable way, from the technology itself, although it may seem that way once a new media system is institutionalized. [e.g. radio takes form as NBC, CBS, etc] Bruno Latour attributes this fable of the inevitable emergence of a new technology to what he calls the "diffusion model" of technoscientific change.

To quote Bruno Latour: "First, it seems that as people so easily agree to transmit the object, it is the object itself that forces them to assent. It then seems that the behavior of people is caused by the diffusion of facts and machines. It is forgotten that the obedient behavior of people is what turns the claims into facts and machines; the careful strategies that give the object the contours that will provide assent are also forgotten. …the model of diffusion invents a technical determinism, paralleled by a scientific determinism. Diesel's engine leaps with its own strength at the consumer's throat, irresistibly forcing itself into trucks and submarines."(Science in Action, 133). We could adapt: radio for engine, home for trucks… Latour mocks the odd genealogies produced by histories of technology, by which facts and machines mate and converge by themselves (for example, phonography + photography = sound film; video + broadcast radio = television). To make the diffusion model more persuasive, a leading role is given the single great genius inventor/ originator: e.g David Sarnoff as the "father of radio" struggling to overcome resistance of those who don't grasp the future of radio. (others: Edison; Gates)

Discussion of this model for understanding the institution of radio.
What could have been different with radio if different decisions had been made?
What potentials in the technology were developed? What potentials were not?