media history

Only 10 years later, in 1980, the post-hippie rock industry had become one of the repressive aspects of capitalism's media machine. The democratic 'spectacle' had been enhanced by modern subconscious manipulation techniques derived from advertisement, the rise of 'telegenic' politicians such as Reagan to power and new techniques of opinion polling. In the early 1980ies centrist German political parties had reached a compromise over the liberalisation of democratic media. The deal foresaw the running of privately owned radio and TV in post-war West Germany for the first time.

The excesses of speed and the emergence of a mass consumer society with its corresponding mediascape were overshadowed by the rise of fascism in Japan and Europe. The gravest challenge of the early 20th century was the "increasing proletarisation of the people and the formation of masses, which are two sides of the same process."1

• 1. cf.

After Hertz found out how to make and receive waves it would still take a long time for radio to find its 'form'. With form I mean the predominant type of social usage of radio waves combined with a specific technological appearance or, in German die apparative Form (apparatic form). Radio, as any mass medium, exists on two different layers, as an imaginary social signification and in its distinct appearance as a 'thing'. I use the term social imaginary significations as closely as possible in the way Cornelius Castoriadis proposes it.

As the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the concepts of history that exist are amazingly poor 1. There are those historians who focus on big events, big personalities, tyrants, revolutions and intermediate periods of peace. In their accounts there is no logic, no structure. History consists of a series of more or less random events in which identifiable individuals play an important role. This is illustrated best by Bertolt Brecht's short poem where he wrote: "Caesar beat the Gauls.

• 1. Castoriadis C. 
  1997.  Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. :285-363.

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.