Martin Spinelli martins@acsu.buffalo.edu Paper delivered at 24 March 1995 Conference, The Convergence of Science and the Humanities: Internet Technologies and Scholarly Resources. INTERNET/RADIO/COMMUNITIES: Social Relations and the New New Media Today I would like to compare two different kinds of rhetoric, the utopian language that surrounded the development of radio, and some of the hype that currently surrounds the internet. From that comparison I'd like to suggest a pattern for the social role of emergent media and posit a less naive, more responsible conception of the net. Listen to this language: For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system. (Enzensberger 15) This notion of a more democratizing medium does not come from a contemporary exaltation of the internet over another kind of unidirectional media, but was written some time before the net took its present shape. It comes from an essay by poet/broadcaster Hans Enzensberger called "Constituents of a theory of the media," written in the early 1970's, and is primarily about radio. As he often laments in this essay, the democratizing potential of radio has gone unrealized for decades. In looking back, volumes of wildly optimistic predictions about the social benefits of expanding listenership clutter the early history of radio. From an examination of the promises and the real development of radio I want to outline a similar, more realistic vision of the net than the one now being put forth by its salesmen. The themes of utopian democracy, a revolution in equal education, and a sense of belonging to a community that dominated early theorization of radio have all infiltrated the description of the internet. These strains of thought bore very little resemblance to the material realities of radio as they would evolve from its origins in the 1920's, as they will seem equally out of place in the development of the net if we proceed on the established course. In fact, the very assertions of ideas of democracy and community may necessarily prevent the net from contributing to a genuine democracy and community if they are allowed to continue to inform our thinking in their present form. "Anything man can imagine," (Codel xi) was how Martin Codel, a newspaper editor and later a theorist about the new means of communication, described the potential of radio in 1930 nearly a decade after the first radio ad quoted Nathaniel Hawthorn to sell suburban homes in New Jersey. (Hilliard 30) Codel exemplifies this utopian strain in writing about radio, disembodied from any political agenda or business program. Radio was nothing short of magical; Codel continues: [T]hat anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. Perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses! (Codel xi) Initially, this kind of futuristic euphoria overwhelmed other attempts at more precise predictions. But it did not take long for the discourse to crystalize around the idea of democracy. Buying a radio was something more than buying "a seat in the theatre of the air", (Codel 32) it was also likened to buying a seat in political chambers, and promised a greater feeling of participation in a national democracy of complete equality. Rudolf Arnheim, a German psychologist of the media and communications, wrote in 1936 that the democratizing power of radio was so complete that it made class distinctions irrelevant, and the very concept of class an anachronism. He writes: Wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. It insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralization, collectivism and standardization. Naturally its influence can only be extended to those who have a set, but from the very first there has nowhere been any attempt to reserve wireless reception as a privilege of certain classes, as it might have happened had the invention been at the disposal of feudal states. (Arnheim 238-39) Arnheim's conception of a public is very revealing. On close analysis, it does not simply include all the people in a society; membership in this public is ultimately defined by consumption. Arnheim further elaborates a kind of credit card democracy: Rather it is the case that wireless, like every other necessity of life from butter to a car and a country house, is accessible to anyone who can pay for it, and since the price of a wireless set and a license can be kept low, wireless, like the newspaper and the film, has immediately become the possession of everyone. (Arnheim 239) The class limitations of his "everyone" are obvious. Radio effaces class distinctions while not erasing them. Arnheim's radio also brings a new conception of community defined in terms of use and interest, not proximity or material relation. He writes of a national unity and identity as coming out of the collapse of geographic space: Wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation. (Arnheim 232-233) Arnheim is open about this collapse of regional sensibility. The new medium he says, is necessarily homogenizing: Just as it incessantly hammers the sound of 'educated speech' into the dialect-speaking mountain-dweller of its own land, it also carries language over the frontier. (Arnheim 233) Arnheim proclaims the colonizing potential of the new medium. In this discussion, the medium is more a legislator of culture than it is a purveyor of choice. In the rhetoric of early radio, this colonization was often married to education. Collected in a celebratory volume on the first decade of radio published in 1930, Joy Elmer Morgan, then the editor of the Journal of the National Education Association, writes about teaching with radio. Morgan sees in radio an educational tool ripe with potential. Radio will provide the ability to network with a huge number of like-minded scholars and the contact will be rich and rewarding. She outlines how the new technology will create a completely integrated nation: It will give to all that common background of information, ideals, and attitudes which binds us together into a vast community of thinking people. It is giving the school a new tool to use in its daily work. No one can estimate the stimulus which will come into unfolding life as radio brings it into instant contact with the great thoughts and deeds of our time. (Codel, 68) Radio is later idealized by Morgan as a kind of familial glue that creates an America of happy homes. A survey of today's radio landscape does not reveal what was then the seen as nascent democracy, community, and educational potential. (For a case study look at the Buffalo, New York area: because of recent FCC deregulations, but for two or three independent hold-outs, all commercial radio stations are now owned by one of four large media companies. The result is a spate of copy-cat formats fighting over the same "average consumer;" this means at any specific time of day we can hear Rush Limbaugh or a sound-a-like on at least three different stations; while at any specific time of evening we can hear Billy Joel on at least three stations simultaneously. This may be the "common background" Morgan refers to but it is very difficult to describe this hegemony as facilitating democracy or giving access to "great thoughts." And as for public radio, the few crumbs of real community programming that are left will be the first to go when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets cut by the 104th Congress because canned programming is much cheaper to run.) Perhaps because these visions for radio were never realized, these same real needs are finding their way into the rhetoric of the net; certainly the same political mechanisms are working towards the private ownership of the net, as the deployment of the same futurist/utopian language will hamper the realization of its genuine democratizing potential. First let's turn to the official vision of internet from the White House, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda For Action. On the first page we encounter language that could have been lifted directly from Morgan's essay on radio and education: The best schools, teachers and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability.... (White House 3) Clearly this education is still based in some school somewhere, and maintains the rather traditional concept of education with students, teachers and courses. Described in this way its disruptive force is not revealed. There is no acknowledgement of the real economic and political problems that can come with this idea of collapsed of geography and local context. Clearly the biggest and best schools would get more and more of the available student population electronically. Because of the dominant supply-and-demand ethos, these schools would get more and more of the educational dollar to create bigger and better programs. Poorer, smaller schools will get left behind in the race to virtualize. The Agenda continues, "vast resources of art, literature, and science are now available everywhere." (White House 5) Participation in a global community of art and literature may come at the price of locally produced art and literature. It is true that the net could be used as an archival site for regionally specific culture, but couched in the Agenda's language of "best" and "greatest", I suspect art means images from the Louvre, not ballads from Appalachia. That speaks to the what is available in the globalized community of the Agenda, but perhaps more interesting is the notion of what the Agenda calls "universal access." Following a vow to promote private sector ownership of the net, the Agenda articulates its number two objective. It reads: Extend the 'universal service' concept to ensure that information resources are available to all at affordable prices. Because information means empowerment--and employment--the government has a duty to ensure that all Americans have access to the resources and job creation potential of the Information Age. (White House 3) It continues: As a matter of fundamental fairness, this nation cannot accept a division of our people among telecommunications or information 'haves' and 'have-nots'. The Administration is committed to developing a broad, modern concept of Universal Service -- one that would emphasize giving all Americans who desire it, easy, affordable access to advanced communications and information services, regardless of income, disability, or location. (White House 8) But the greater questions are what shape will this access take and what will be its effect? It may be simply access to a panacea, a false cure to alleviate real social problems. The most cynical thinking goes something like this: Let's give welfare mothers lap-tops. That way they can get their benefits and do their shopping online and we can end the wasteful bureaucracies of Food Stamps and WIC; they shouldn't ask for better schools because the best courses and teachers are already online; they won't need better ways of holding their elected officials accountable is a protest or a boycott are irrelevant if they can send their virtual dissent to Congress electronically. The feeling of representation in a community replaces real representation. As with radio, the Agenda promises classlessness in an information age. Its manifesto continues: It can ameliorate the constraints of geography and economic status, and give all Americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them. (White House 12) Ameliorating constraints is code for effacing real class difference. The myth is that information or access to information is a great leveler, that if everyone has an account the equality (albeit an immaterial equality) of the American Dream has been achieved. As with Arnheim's radio, democracy in the Agenda means the ability to consume. Vice President Al Gore, in his contribution to the Agenda, goes so far as to say, "We can design a customer- driven electronic government." Those without the technology, or without the opportunity to learn how to use this very class-bound technology, are left without representation in this electronic government. This conflation of the consumer with the voter can do nothing to realize the genuine democratic potential of the net. A similar kind of myopic inclusion is evident in the assertion of community on the net. For a quick reference to this new community spirit I refer to Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (1994). In a book which extols the net as the new informal meeting place, a space that has replaced the pub, the cafe, and the park, Rheingold somehow manages to claim the highest achievement for his electronic community, the San Francisco based WELL, is the ability to transport the user to yet another community. He describes the WELL as "a small town" with "a doorway that opens onto the blooming, buzzing confusion of the Net." (Rheingold 10) Movement, not destination is the real goal. This reveals much: firstly, that the net has clearly not replaced the local community in that it's greatest achievement is transporting the user out of it. The promise of connection is more important than what you're are connecting to, this is the impulse that led to the virtualization of community in the first place--an eagerness to abandon and move on, rather than to work in and develop a community, mirrors the promise of that first radio ad: the better world is always through the next gateway, ready-made and without those noisy neighbors; and further, a buffet of choices is more important than developing the potential of the options or spaces already available. This is the model of 500-channel television. I don't mean to dismiss utopian thinking entirely. I think in an age of reactionary politicians all too ready to brand progressive thinking as idealistic, or unworkable, there is a real value in utopian thinking around the internet. What I would like to argue for is a smarter, more aware, set of ideals to guide our thinking, a set of ideals conscious of the material realities of the internet and the information age that does not pretend that easy access is social penicillin. To conclude with this I would like to return to Enzensberger because I think his theory of the media holds the key to unlocking the real social potential of the net. Enzensberger sees in the media, not a panacea or a pacifier for the disenfranchised, but the power to mobilize. This mobilization is not the virtual movement of telnetting from San Francisco to Milan, nor is it access to the Library of Congress at affordable prices. It is the mobilization of production--that is, a public defined as producers, not consumers. Corporate ownership of the media is antithetical to this notion of universal production and only affords the most inscribed and simulated form of production: To this end, the men who own the media have developed special programmes which are usually called 'Democratic Forum' or something of the kind. There, tucked away in the corner, the reader(listener/viewer) has his say, which can naturally be cut short at any time. As is the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback. (Enzensberger 22) The responsible role for those in possession of the technology of use, is to insure not a universal access to what has already been produced, but a universal knowledge of media production which grows out of, and contributes to, an understanding of material social relations. Neither the internet, nor radio, is some kind of deus ex machina of democracy, community, or education. The net is only a new tool, existing in a specific context with a real set of material confines and with a truly profound potential. But it is a potential that will remain unrealized if we allow the drive to virtualize to obscure its material base. Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio, trans. Margret Ludwig and Herbert Read. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. Reprint, New York: Arno and The New York Times, 1971. Codel, Martin. Radio and Its Future. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1930. Reprint, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," New Left Review #64. Hilliard, Robert and Michael Keith. The Broadcast Century. Boston: Focal Press, 1992. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. The White House. The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action. Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1993.