New Radio Strategies

The title’s taken shamelessly from Simon Schama’s recent BBC TV documentary series, The American Future: a History. And I’ve borrowed it as a way of explaining why I, as a media historian, am involved in something as forward-gazing as New Radio Strategies. Schama’s been conveying, in his usual lucid prose, how present-day American politics is shaped by the past, how it draws upon the past, how the past is full of a sense of the future. In more mundane fashion, I’m similarly intrigued by the relationship between radio’s past and radio’s future. Let me give two examples.

First, I’m currently reading the 1931 autobiography of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Victorian physicist who first publicly demonstrated radio transmission in an Oxford lecture theatre in 1894. Leaving aside the complex and disputed issue of who ‘invented’ radio, where, and when, we certainly know that Lodge has a strong claim to be counted among the founding figures of the medium. With his mind focused on pure science, he let the technology slip into the hands of other, more commercially-minded men, chief among them Marconi. But what intrigues me is the way in which, given both his later desire to communicate science to a wider public through radio talks and his equally well-known dabbling with psychic phenomena – most famously, perhaps, his belief that he could use wireless to ‘contact’ his son, Raymond, following his death at the Somme in 1916 – he somehow envisaged the communicative potential of the medium far more honestly and intuitively than Marconi ever did. I think his story might be a revealing way into the fundamental question of why radio took off as a social phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War. To push the matter further still, I’d like to know – and I’m looking for ways to find out – exactly what it felt like for ordinary people to listen to radio in the earliest years, how it changed the way they thought about the world. They’re questions we need to keep asking, I think – childish, ’so what?’ questions, maybe, but ones that surely need to be asked at all stages of technological development.

My second interest in radio’s relationship between past and future is more taxing, perhaps. It’s to historicize the ‘digital revolution’. Or, to put it another way, it’s to ask what the broader historical significance might be of recent and current shifts in listening habits, when, in the future, we look back to the present. Actually, my default position on such matters, having been educated as a Medievalist in thrall to the Long Duree approach, is to quote Chou En Lai’s reply when asked a few years back for his reading of the effect of the French Revolution of 1789: “too early to tell”, he is said to have replied. Yet, the journalist in me wants to have a go at that first draft of history. Besides, my horizon isn’t endless: I’m not planning to capture every dimension of social change. How could I? My focus, in fact, is very much just on consciousness. I’m interested in knowing where the digital revolution might be taking our brains. And there are some interesting developments in cognate disciplines that we need to keep an eye on, I reckon. True, talk of media ‘effects’ is supposed to have had its day. But, having rubbished the first, and most primitive versions of this school of analysis, it might be time to re-examine some of its more persuasive aspects. The 1990s, so the neuroscientists say, was the ‘decade of the brain’. We now know quite a bit more than we did in the 1930s, or even in the 1980s, about the relationship between the senses and our thought-processes. The brain, it would seem, is highly plastic: what we see and hear re-wires it more than we imagined. The field for research is opening up in exciting ways. And, as I try to navigate my way through it, I’d like to think aloud here, with you – and to know whether you think I’m discovering new frontiers or I’m simply lost in a New World wilderness of my own foolish making.