On the crest of the waves

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1997 by Herve Bourges

Initially, as its name indicates, wireless was a system of long-distance communication without wires. Transmitted in real time, the radio signal defies distance, geographical barriers and geopolitical frontiers. Ubiquitous and instantaneous, radio was the first technological manifestation of a virtual reality whose mysteries are still being explored today. It took a generation before its cultural significance was fully perceived. At first transmitting the language of telegraphy, it was soon being used in the merchant navy, in aviation and above all in the armed forces, where it had many applications.

Broadcasting only became an important medium of mass communication in the industrialized countries in the late 1920s; the trend was reinforced in the following decade. The expansion of radio was steamrollered by two very powerful forces that are still at work. One was industrial development; the other was political and commercial propaganda.

From crystal set to satellite

The development of radio as a medium of mass communication was shaped to a large extent by the arrival on the market of successive generations of receivers.

The valve receiver, which replaced the pioneering crystal set, was a heavy piece of walnut or rosewood drawing-room furniture. What did it matter if amplitude modulation (AM) coverage (on medium wave, long wave and short wave) was still somewhat hit and miss? Radio was entering the home at the speed of sound.

In the United States, big companies like RCA broadcast musicals featuring the stars of Broadway. While the cinema was still silent radio hummed to the rhythms of jazz and ragtime. In Europe, where post and telecommunications ministries monopolized the airwaves, programmes tended to be more formal - concerts from the Royal Albert Hall, classics from the Comedie-Francaise, and decorous tea dances.

But on both sides of the Atlantic a new social ritual came in as people gathered to listen to the wireless. In the 1950s the TV set would become the focal point of a similar kind of convivial relationship.

Reaching a world audience

The transistor radio came on the scene in the early 1960s, when the TV set was gradually taking the place of the radio in the home. Along with the record player, it soon became a cult object of the consumer society. Cheap enough to be a mass-produced instrument of personal entertainment, it was a symbol of teenage emancipation in the rich countries. From the North Sea pirate stations to the studio that appears in the film American Graffiti, a whole generation celebrated its values, its counter-culture and its music (rock) on the air.

The cheapness of transistor sets also made radio the mass medium best suited to the poor countries, above all in regions where distances and infrastructural weakness meant that communication had to take place over the airwaves.

At the same time, radio became mobile. This was the age of the car radio. Soon, frequency modulation (FM) was encouraging programme proliferation, neighbourhood radio stations and audience segmentation. The extent of the latter, especially in the United States, seems to have gone so far that it is hard to know what people really do listen to.

Will the time come when radio no longer federates distant audiences and different socio-cultural backgrounds? Will digital broadcasting turn it into an elite medium, for example? Some European manufacturers seem to be opting for systems such as digital audio broadcasting (DAB), which offer high definition sound and multimedia services, but require far more expensive receivers. Perhaps consumers will make different choices.

Broadcasting policies have followed the main trends of twentieth-century history so closely that they are almost mirrors of our time. The turning point came during the period of reconstruction after the Second World War, when governments realized that audiovisual communication was a key instrument in public life, a sensitive area that ought to be controlled in the public interest.

From monopolies to pluralism

After first national, then international, allocation of frequencies came the development of state radio systems. Once the age of totalitarian illusions was over propaganda radio stations became champions of sovereignty and in some cases supporters of national liberation movements.

Public audiovisual networks put out programmes containing a mix of light entertainment, news and educational broadcasting the main strands in the fabric of contemporary culture. They were organized in different ways in different countries: kept under relatively close supervision by the executive in countries such as France, Spain and Portugal; shared between political parties (Italy); air time divided between voluntary service and religious groups (The Netherlands); separate services for different language communities (Switzerland and Belgium).

This kind of regulatory set-up came to prevail on almost all the continents, except North America. Over two centuries ago the United States wrote into its constitution an amendment which prevents congress from legislating to establish a religion or abridge freedom of speech or the press. To appreciate the astonishingly progressive nature of such a provision, it is hardly necessary to recall that royal or imperial censorship existed in most European states at that time and that censors violated the secrecy of private correspondence as well as keeping tabs on printed matter.