Preface

My earliest radio memories go back to my grandmother's living room/kitchen. In this two bed room flat in a social housing estate in Graz in the 1960ies radio was the dominant medium. Every day during lunchtime the whole family would listen to an hour long news programme on Austrian state radio ORF. Austrian politics as well as world affairs broke into the domestic reality of our kitchen through this apparatus: The Cuban crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedy's, the Vietnam war, the war in Palestine, the political awakening of Muhammed Ali and the student's revolt. The valve audio amplifier inside the brown wooden case of our apparatus delivered the voices of professional news presenters in a particularily warm tone even when they spoke of the threat of nuclear extinction. The radio in the kitchen room empowered my grandparents to be politically informed and make conscious decisions about voting. The right to access to education and the right to vote had been denied to them by a backward and regressive system in the past, which is why they valued those things, education and voting, so highly when they grew older. Memories such as those combine to shape my perception of radio ... radio means voices floating through the kitchen and mixing with the smell of food. Radio means places far away, joys and threats unknown. Radio means a string concert while my grandmother tells me stories about hardship she experienced in her youth. As she was borne almost at the beginning of the 20th century, her stories became for me, inevitably intertwined with the narration of the century of radio. I would like make my first proposition: Those who write about new and old media should not try to become impartial, emotionless and bodyless voices which so often characterise theoretic writing. We should be able to stand fully behind what we say with everything that we have not just as intellectuals or artists but as human beings and we should not be afraid to expose ourselves as fallible humans.