COMM620/Hobbyists
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I. Listener-centered history
"Because hobbies are pursued during leisure hours, often in private, and seem nonproductive in terms of the larger economy, they often get short shrift in historical accounts of America's technological revolution. This is a mistake. By ignoring hobbies - from men tinkering with their Model T's to women working on their sewing machines - we miss the critical history of the rise and fall of technical literacy in the United States." (Douglas 328-329)
In Listening In, Susan Douglas develops a listener-centered approach to the study of North American radio. Across several contexts, she details complex, active listening practices that challenge the common image of passive audiences transfixed by a mass culture. The listeners in Douglas' narrative use radio as a tool to experience a unified American identity at the same time as they negotiate regional, ethnic, and linguistic differences. The participatory audience practices she desribes are not limited to radio listenership alone. From the very start, Douglas alludes to resonances among other twentieth century communication technologies; mostly notably, the personal computer.
Douglas describes amateur radio operators, or "hams", as "the hackers of the early twentieth century" as much for their anti-authoritarian mischief as their productive curiosity (51). She later compares the widespread adoption of radio in the 1920s with "the spread of home computing" in the 1980s and 1990s (55). These parallels suggest that the study of mid-century radio might provide guidance for confronting the challenges of contemporary computer-mediated culture. Who are the hacker-hobbyists? What are their motivations? What is their role in the development of media technology, industry, culture, and policy?
Unfortunately, as Douglas frequently notes, early radio was so poorly archived that comprehensive history projects are difficult to undertake (9). Gaps in the historical record often accompany the most intriguing phenomena and limit investigation to, at best, informed speculation. As a methodological example, Listening In prompts consideration for the contemporary state of user-centered media history. What present-day artifacts are lost and which will remain?
II. Listener/Users
The listeners in Douglas' account of American radio are hardly a monolithic block. They listen differently, to different programs, for different reasons, in different times and places, and with different tools. One of the challenges of early radio advertising was to bound a group that defied most conventional social categorizations (124). For the purposes of this essay, it is helpful to begin by first identifying what the listeners are not.
Listeners may understand and "tinker" with radio technology but they need not be credentialed experts. They may integrate radio into their professional lives but they are not major players in the media industry. They may vote and even lobby Congress but they are not directly involved with the creation of regulatory legislation. Of course, radio technicians, broadcasters, and policy-makers all take their turns as listeners but to be a listener requires no particular training or expertise.
By this vague definition, Douglas' radio listener is not unlike today's personal computer user. Users, like listeners, are driven to computing by wildly diverse motivations, from the highly social to the agoraphobic, from gadget fetishism to sports fanaticism. The experience of both computer users and radio listeners is in constant relation to the current state of technology, policy, and industry. As a result, listener/users develop shifting, dynamic habits that anticipate and adapt to unstable circumstances.
There is one group among the listener population to which Douglas frequently returns: the hobbyists. Listening In begins and ends with chapters about ham radio operators and they are present in each moment of transition in her radio narrative. They are the only group of listener/users that is licensed and explicitly protected by FCC policy. And yet, despite the steady growth of the ham population, they are less visible than ever (328). What distinguishes the hobbyist from other listener/users? How do hobbyist practices interrelate with shifts in technology, industry, and policy? What characteristics do hobbyists share across regional, temporal, and technological domains?
III. Hobbyists
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", Arthur C. Clarke
Unlike telegraphy with its miles and miles of wire, radio has always been a technology interwoven with myth, mystery and mysticism. Initially dubbed "wireless telegraphy," radio signals travel through a seemingly intangible, ungraspable medium (40). Early operators were surely surprised to learn that the propagation of radio signals is omnidirectional, occasionally unpredictable, and difficult to trace. With a properly configured system of wire and crystal, radio receivers coaxed code, voices, and music seemingly out of the air. Long after the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum were identified, popular accounts of radio offered romantic descriptions of the medium as "ether", "moonbeams", and "dreamland." (41)
As radio remained magical, so its operators became, for some time, a fraternity of "wizards" (41). Wizards were those hardcore listeners who chose to explore the limits of radio's technological substrate rather than its programming or communication possibilities. They earned their elevated nickname by wrangling with the electromagnetic frequencies that oscillate in an unsenseable slice of spectrum between hearing and seeing (37). In the 1970s, computer users revived "wizard", that term of occult reverence, to describe the pioneering explorers of online space. Hafner and Lyon titled their 1998 internet history, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, and the Jargon File of hacker slang reserves "wizard" for network administrators and software engineers with the deepest understanding of their systems' core structure and organizing logics.[1] Wizard status is not a credential granted by an institution or a title the hobbyist might give himself. In both radio and computing culture, wizards are always identified by their fellow listener/users.
Although the technology and industry of radio was, from the start, apparently owned by highly-capitalized corporations, these organizations acted primarily as amplifiers for practices developed by others. Early in her account, Douglas identifies a loosely-connected group of hobbyists whose experiments formed a technological and cultural foundation upon which the North American broadcast industries could be built. Likewise, though military funding and university research made possible initial experiments in personal computing, large corporations such as HP and Xerox were not able to bring these technologies to the marketplace. In spite of limited access to the latest academic and industrial research, it was the work of tinkering, unaffiliated hobbyists that ultimately introduced computing to the North American home.
The many mini-biographies in Douglas' research provide a strong starting point for characterizing this group of hobbyist/hackers[2] Though the hobbyist is typically unaffiliated with large corporations, research universities, and government organizations, their material and theoretical practices are interwoven with the work of these institutions. Of all three, the military is most often over-looked as a source of technical training, service experience, and surplus equipment for the hobbyist community.[3] Just as the lived experiences of enlisted men are often lost among military histories, so the story of the hobbyist remains largely untold.
The radio hobbyists of the early twentieth century engaged with radio as a platform. Less concerned with the content of their transmissions, many in the hobbyist community placed "contact" above all other goals. Through the manipulation of circuits and antennae, "distance freaks" developed an "exploratory" mode of listening in pursuit of signals from ever more distant stations (58). The earliest personal computer hobbyists maintained a similar prioritization of platform over productivity. Although input was laborious and output was minimal on early machines, "contact" with a responsive, logical personal computer inspired a sense of magic and wonder that would have been familiar to first generation radio hobbyists.
Before the radio industry was standardized by the 1912 Radio Act, all radio operators had the potential to become broadcasters. None of the programming conventions taken for granted today - on-air advertising, playing records, call-in talk shows - were inevitable developments. They are the result of hundreds of hobbyist operators dreaming up new uses for their homebuilt rigs. In this respect, hobbyist innovations are as often social and entrepreneurial as they are technical. Even as government regulation stabilized the technological substrate of radio, the hobbyist impulse to experiment shifted from the soldering iron to the microphone.
IV. Hobbyists post-standardization
Hobbyists live with and through new media technologies. Before the radio spread into widespread use, the hobbyists were first to incorporate it into their day-to-day practices. The uses they modeled were not natural or obvious developments of wireless technology. They emerged as a result of the hobbyists' deployment of radio within a socio-cultural context. As such, listener/users frequently develop demands and expections that media and technology industries cannot predict.
In the early 1900s, the nascent radio industry routinely appropriated customs and practices nurtured first by hobbyists. At the same time, industry representatives lobbied Congress (successfully) for legislation to limit "amateur" activity on the airwaves. In Douglas' narrative, this counter-intuitive turn marks the beginning of a cycle by which outsiders provide profitable innovations to the dominant industries only to find their own practices restricted by policy they had little part in creating.[4] That such a seemingly exploitative cycle does not destroy the hobbyist community suggests that the relationship might be more symbiotic than it first appears. Rather than stymie innovation, constraints on amateur activity may actually sustain experimentation by producing a state of constant change.
Sensing their essential role in the cycle of innovation-appropriation-commodification-regulation, some hobbyists turned their diversions into businesses. These efforts appear to follow three general patterns. In the first, hobbyist entrepreneurs serve their peers. They might start a special interest magazine or a mailorder catalog for radio parts. In another pattern, the hobbyist serves the larger population of listener/users as a salesman or service technician. Lastly, some hobbyists will exploit their skills and experience as employees of existing corporations entering the radio market. In each case, the entrepreneurs' economic worth depends on their continued identification as hobbyists.
Standardization of radio technology in 1912 curbed technological experimentation but hobbyist activities continued to influence radio's political, social, and industrial development. Not only do computing hobbyists follow similar a pattern, the fluidity with which radio hobbyists shifted domains suggests that the distinction between radio and computer hobbyists is rather superficial. Both groups pioneered cultural, technological, and entrepreneurial practices that were later appropriated by dominant media and technologies industrie and both groups have had a challenging relationship with government regulation.
V. Conclusion
The hacker, tinkerer, amateur, and hobbyist figure is essential to the development of communication technologies, industries, and cultures in the twentieth century. These after-work innovators are generally unaffiliated with large insitutions and their practices are characterized by the creative (re-)use of extant materials. Douglas radio history reveals that hobbyist innovations are as often social and entrepreneurial as they are technical. From the radio to the PC, the hobbyist imagines a possible future and then enacts, lives, and embodies it.
References
Douglas, Susan. (1999) Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination New York: Random House.
Footnotes
- ↑ http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wizard.html
- ↑ Note that hobbyists are only called "amateurs" after their innovations have been fully appropriated by the dominant industrial institutions (58).
- ↑ Douglas identifies mild "booms" in North American hobbyist activity following both of the World Wars (333).
- ↑ Since 1914, the amateur (or "ham") radio community has protected itself via the Amateur Radio Relay League, a membership organization that lobbies on behalf of amateur operators.
