Early Radio Flashcards
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Title Slide
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Early Radio
By Susan J. Douglas
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Slide 2: Summary
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- Cultural revolution: boys and men did the trend of connecting headphones to to small black boxes powered by set of batteries; much lesser extent, girls and women involved too.
- No predictable program schedule; very little ads, sunday church services, stories aimed towards children with lectures on hygiene, or how to make a house home.
- DXing arises - hobby of receiving and identifying distant radio or television signals, or making two way radio contact with distant stations in amateur radio, citizens’ band radio or other two way radio communications.
- Music listening; improved loudspeakers
- Story listening; same characters enact comedic or dramatic performances
- Radio Act of 1912: required amateurs to be licensed; forbade to transmit on main commercial & military wavelengths
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Slide 3: Major Arguments
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- What was best to broadcast?; Learn how to listen, how they wanted to listen, & what they wanted to listen to at the time; what is the meaning of retreating to home and turn to listening?
- Manhood & nationhood: brought device into the home & tinker with it - why not women? bc 1920s, still male dominance. asserted new forms of masculine mastery.
- Reasoning of rapid explosion of exploratory listening: ham operators; not boy scout types - sent obscene/false msgs, especially to US Navy (major military user of wireless) Ex) Titanic disaster
- Gov’t banned amateur activity & closed stations just so they don’t interfere with gov’t transmissions
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Slide 4: Major Arguments Cont.
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- Modernity had arrived: proliferation of new technologies, shortening of hemlines & bobbing for hair, the spread of modernism of art, literature, & music, and census report - that Victorian culture had been overthrown.
- The popular fancy with the rapidity of radio listening that has redefined everyday life as unprecedented
- 1920s characterized by reaction, some vicious like women suffrage, 2nd wave of immigration, rise of KKK, etc.
- Radio delivering and forging a national culture in 30’s & 40’s – why not when it started? couldn’t - used to celebrate and strengthen local, ethnic, religious, and class-based communities & participate in elections.
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Slide 5: Questions
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- ) If AT&T had not pioneered the use of radio advertising, what would be different? - need Steve’s help!
- ) If girls & women had brought the radio device home - how would things differ? - Male still would of taken over as dominance and provide no credit/ or amateur radio would have altered and revolutionized to something better?
- ) Should the government have banned amateur stations? - No, keeps society from knowing the truth - we have the right to know.
- ) As historians believed that radio played a central role, how much more could it have become without all the violence that came about? - Did radio create these violence to occur?
