After thinking about AM radio for the last couple of days, I went back to Patrick Day’s book about the early years of radio broadcasting in New Zealand, ‘The Radio Years’, where I re-read a line I’ve seen dozens of times, but it only just stuck out to me this time.
It was the idea that radio transmission is predominantly – almost exclusively – a one-way affair. One to many. It’s called broadcasting. The metaphor is taken from an agricultural context, depicting the distribution of seeds, which scatter and fall where they will. That’s the way it is with radio. And this – think about it – is the point: it need not have necessarily been that way.
So while I get nostaligic about AM radio, I’ll just pause briefly and think about its original intended use: as point to point communication, just as we use cellphones today. We decided we didn’t want radio to be used that way, just as we decided that we didn’t want to use phones for the broadcast of music (which was trialled, and eventually rejected). Uses of technology are socially negotiated.
It is refreshing to discover, amidst the shift to digital – and the dragging of Radio New Zealand into the 1980s with the rollout of FM broadcasting – that there are some diehard traditionalists still out there.
At the New Jersey State Museum’s “Super Science Weekend” last month, kids were encouraged to get excited about amateur ‘ham’ radio. It is very much a dying hobby.
Forget the crystal set – who among us knows how to tap out our call letters on a Morse key?
The only morse code I know off by heart is ‘SOS’ – and the opening to the B52’s ‘Planet Claire’… and I don’t think that really spells anything.
