Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface

Fickers, Andreas

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195388947.013.1001

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In their distinct ways, the articles collected here show that it is worthwhile to understand radio as a medium that conjures an imagined space. 13 This space is a crossborder one, where references to specific places are an invitation, not a restriction. Radio with its soundscapes, distant yet intimate voices and music indeed offers much scope for imagination and emotion.…”

Section: Obstacles Methods and Perspectives: Researching Radio Beyonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Radio Beyond Boundaries: An Introduction

Hochscherf¹,

Legay²,

Wagner

2019

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

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National broadcasting cultures as dominant points of reference Besides other public intellectuals, no less a person than Bertolt Brecht was very enthusiastic about wireless broadcasting. In his 1932 speech 'Radio as an Apparatus of Communication', he considered the potentials of radio for democracy by discussing how the relatively new medium could overcome social and political boundaries if it establishes formats to communicate with listeners and point out sociopolitical deficits. 1 Among other demands, he calls for a critical public-service medium that controls those in power. Brecht's ideas have been instrumental in democratic societies where radio has become part of the fourth estate alongside print media and, some years later, television. Today, his thoughts are part of public-service agreements, broadcasting acts or editorial policies. Brecht's suggestions even have become a benchmark for the evaluation of national radio cultures: have they developed formats and modes that use the medium's ontological characteristics, has radio become a medium of communication with the population of a specific country or region, has it developed ways to control the national government? As these questions illustrate, the nation state has been the dominant reference point for radio, and with it radio scholarship, too. Radiolike broadcasting in generalhas been quintessentially shaped by specific regions or nation states. Most radio services and channels, in fact, not only explicitly refer to a geolocation through their names, but also their remit and target audience is more often than not linked to a particular country, a region or a city. Moreover, radio programmes and enterprises are subject to control and guidance by the responsible regulatory bodies, interest groups and media laws. It remains to be seen if such rootedness in specific geological or cultural locations will be overcome with new means of broadcast technology that relies on digital formats and the internet. Whereas

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Section: Obstacles Methods and Perspectives: Researching Radio Beyonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Radio Beyond Boundaries: An Introduction

Hochscherf¹,

Legay²,

Wagner

2019

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

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“…At the institutional level, such revised narratives might highlight the importance of otherwise small moments in the histories of these stations. One came during the 1933 Lucerne Conference, which convened countries from the European broadcasting area under the International Broadcasting Union, to minimize interference by allocating particular frequencies to planned or existing national radio broadcasting services (Fickers, ). This conference took place before the PBS, ESB, or BBC's Arabic service had begun operations—but involved Egypt and Palestine because the Levant was considered to fall within the European broadcasting area and because they were expected to launch broadcasting stations in the future.…”

Section: Transnationalism and Radio Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Can imperial radio be transnational? British‐affiliated Arabic radio broadcasting in the interwar period

Stanton

2020

History Compass

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This media history article uses the development of the British Broadcasting Corporation's Arabic radio broadcasting service in 1938 as a case study for considering the intersections and overlaps between transnationalism and imperialism in the early mid-20th century. Archival evidence suggests that the British Broadcasting Corporation's Arabic broadcasting service, which was based in London, relied for human resources, programming, and other forms of expertise on the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem and the Egyptian State Broadcasting Service in Cairo-as well as on British government officials in those countries. Yet scholarly literature on these stations tends to treat them as free-standing institutions with minimal interaction. How might recent scholarship on entangled media histories productively problematize the treatment of radio histories as institutional histories within nation-state boundaries? How might it capture both the transnational and the colonial or imperial connections of these stations? It closes by suggesting how this case study might be useful for scholars working in other arenas.

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“…(Arnheim 1936: 31). This transnational promise of radio was materialized -if not always realized (Falkenberg 2005: 186) -during radio's 'classical' era in the form of tuning dials featuring foreign cities (Fickers 2012a). In his 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for example, the poet Seamus Heaney credited such a dial, along "those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech," he discovered from turning it, "even though I did not understand what was being said," with starting him on "a journey into the wideness of the world beyond."…”

Section: Always Already Transnationalmentioning

confidence: 99%