2006
Funkerspuk
The following is the description of a lecture I’m going to give at the 23. Chaos Communication Congress - Who Can You Trust?, which takes place in Berlin from December 27th to December 30th 2006. It extends some things I’ve allready mentioned in this posting: Distributing Soundwaves - Radio.
Abstract
The introduction of radio in the USA and Germany is compared, the role amateurs played and how the respective authorities reacted to them. Questions arise as to how those reactions were models for the treatment of younger communications technologies, and the different approaches to uncontrolled communication will be sketched out. Is “everybody can listen in” a scary thing?
Submission Notes
Radio was one of the first technologies to provoke that obsessive play that later resulted in the ‘geek’ stereotype/reality. It was empowering communication through self built & played with appliances like nothing before. In the reactions of the governments of the time models for the reactions to new communication technologies were established. In fact, the two-way communication possible through amateur radio likens it way more to modern networking technologies than to any of the other ‘big media’ that have evolved in the meantime, TV as well as the different incarnations of music recording and playback, video etc.. But the reactions to radio in the USA and Germany in the early twentieth century were completely different. In the former, the amateurs were accepted, organised, listened to in regards of legislation issues, and found to be a handy resource to rely on in WW1. In the latter, the amateurs were only produced by WW1, educated in the army, and had a brief flowering through the ‘Mißbrauch von Heeresgerät’ (’misuse of military property’) afterwards, but were illegalised after the failed November Revolution of 1918. Radio in the Weimar Republik was controlled by an huge censoring apparatus. Nobody thought of extending the freedom of the press to radio.
In fact, the introduction of organised radio broadcasting was hindered by the slowness of the german authorities in deciding on which kind of control to rely on: somebody checking the material before it is broadcast, somebody being present in the studio while it is broadcast, or somebody personally controlling every single receiver in the country. Later, the amount of radio control allready established made it extremely easy to take hold of by Goebbels after the ‘Machtergreifung’, and amateur radio only got legal after WW2. So, while in the USA a private radio industry developed, with all the characteristics a private culture industry has, in germany it stayed a government controlled medium; whereas in the USA the uncontrolled communication of amateurs was taken for granted, nothing could have scared the german authorities more.
Content Description (redundant to submission notes)
The role of radio amateurs in the introduction of radio and the development of radio legislation is sketched out, as well as the ways in which they were treated (by this legislation). The First World War serves as an important point of reference in making clear the differences between the two countries:
The american army could allready access a significant number of self-educated amateurs, while in Germany many radio operators where educated during the war for the military, and only became effective as independent amateurs after the war, when they seized military radio equipment in great numbers (the phenomen whose name gave this talk its title). While in the USA self-organised amateur organisations where listened to by congress regarding radio legislation, and their interest actually considered, in Germany the involvment of many amateurs in the November Revolution scarred the authorities so much that they became obsessed with the control and taming of radio, cencorship and elimination of ‘Funkerspuk’ - these aims shaped radio legislation in the Weimar Republic. It was noticed how well radio is suited to broadcasting news, but nobody got the idea that freedom of the press might apply to it, too. One of the consequences was that Goebbels did not so much have to build a new control apparatus for radio than seize an existing one. Later the german quest for control boosted the development and spread of magnetic tape, while the economic interests of the commercial radio networks inhibited its use in the USA. More details in the lecture.