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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 3(2): 153159
[1367-8779(200008)3:2; 153159; 013867]

Radiocracy
Sound and citizenship

John Hartley
Queensland University of Technology

The history of radio from the early pre-broadcasting period

shows how transmitted music and talk have been caught up in the evolution of
contemporary citizenship. The article discusses Bertolt Brechts experiments in
public radio in the 1920s, and argues that commercial radio can also be seen to
have contributed to the self-identification of imagined communities.
Internationally, despite the ascendance of other broadcast and communications
media, radio continues to be used in a variety of community-building
developmental situations, providing remote, marginal and disenfranchised
communities with low-cost, low-tech public space. Radio remains one of the
pillars of civil society, combining entertainment and democracy, sound and
citizenship. This article is a modified version of the welcome address that
launched the Radiocracy conference.

ABSTRACT

Brecht citizenship
entertainment nation radio

KEYWORDS

democracy

development

Radiocrats
With some of the BBCs most militant scourges of academic jargon lurking
nearby, I had better be sparing with barbarous neologisms, and I hereby
apologize for coining radiocracy the word. I wont mention within
earshot of our first guest speaker, John Humphrys,1 that radiocracy

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government by radio may be part of an ever larger and, not least for him,
even more disturbing hybrid that I have called democratainment (Hartley,
1999: chapter 12).
Professional broadcasters have long known they are poised, sometimes
but not always with effortless grace, between democracy and entertainment,
between public and private life, between the sublime and the cor blimey.
Radio is the oldest but not always the best researched example of how these
polarities have been organized and played out in the unpredictable immediacy of daily life. Many broadcasters are radiocrats, including those who
would balk at the word itself. But some of the most impressive uses of radio
for democratic development have been in formats well beyond the political
cut and thrust of the kind associated with John Humphrys in the UK.
Radiocrats have used music, comedy, drama and light entertainment to
advance their cause.
How does a community identify itself as such? What connects its members
to the imagined community of modern associated life? What links that
community to its representative bodies, and to the world at large? How do
smaller groups, especially remote, marginal, disenfranchised or oppressed
communities, press for their place among others? The Radiocracy: Radio,
Democracy and Development conference set out to explore some of these
questions. Along the way, it is important to assess how the polarities
between public and private, democracy and entertainment have changed,
and whether those distinctions are viable any longer. Meanwhile, concepts
that were once associated with living persons have increasingly been caught
up in modern media provision. Citizenship, nationality, even identity, are
now virtualized, extending our being well beyond our own personal
embodiment.
In the days of the BBC Radio Newsreel, which had the signature tune
Imperial Echoes, it was possible to imagine that citizenship and music were
one and the same thing. As those echoes have died away, to be replaced by
the rhythms of drum and bass, as Britannia fades to Britney, there is
somehow less consensus about the integration of public and private life. The
martial oompah of imperial history has become the drunken Ibiza of international clubbing. What is the connection between the government and the
Ministry of Sound (a club and associated marketing brand in the UK); what
has sound to do with citizenship?

Early days: Brecht versus the Radio Music Box

These themes were set in motion in Cardiff, location of the Radiocracy
conference. The first wireless transmission over water, precursor of the radio
age, was achieved in 1895, in a demonstration by Guglielmo Marconi, from
Lavernock Point to Steep Holm Island in the Bristol Channel. Unfortunately,
the commemorative bronze plaque at Lavernock Point was recently

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souvenired, but the historic event is celebrated in a recent sculpture, appropriately linking public themes with commercial development, that enlivens
a busy roundabout to Tescos supermarket in Penarth Marina. It is a stainless steel kite-aerial soaring above a stainless steel radio apparatus.
In the early period of broadcast radio, in the late 1920s, Bertolt Brecht
wrote of the need to make radio into something really democratic: It was
suddenly possible to say everything to everybody but, thinking about it,
there was nothing to say (Brecht, 1979/80: 24). He was chiding the broadcasters for not being ambitious enough, and mocking radio for being an
inconsequential distribution system an acoustical department store in
which you could learn in English how to keep chickens to the Pilgrims
Chorus from Tannhuser (1979/80: 24). Instead, Brecht wanted to promote
his vision for broadcast radio as a two-way medium of communication, if
only:
it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of making the listener not only hear but also speak, not of isolating him but connecting him.
. . . That is why it is extremely positive when radio attempts to give public
affairs a truly public nature. (Brecht, 1979/80: 25)

Brecht produced at least two plays for German radio based on his didactic epic theatre principles, in which some of his ideas for involving the
masses directly in radio were put into practice. Listeners were to take the
role of chorus and join in with the performers (see Hood, 1979/80) an
early form of talkback, perhaps.
In addition to epic theatre, Brecht saw clearly that radio provided an
unprecedented opportunity for citizen participation in public life. He recommended actuality broadcasting of politics and important trials; real
interviews and debates (instead of dead reports); lectures and discussions
instead of the grey uniformity of the daily menu of light music and language
courses (quoted in Hood, 1979/80: 18). In short, as early as 1927, radio
was envisaged as a means for community-building, collective communication and dramatic imagination. Brecht saw radio as a perfect opportunity
for building a public sphere and for promoting the development of civil
society. Radio allowed direct contact with the population at large, bypassing the existing ideological apparatuses of the state. This heroic role for
radio was not able to survive in the political circumstances of 1930s
Germany. But those same circumstances demonstrated exactly why Brecht
was on to something worthwhile in radio theory.
Meanwhile, in Britain and the USA, a different model of broadcasting had
already been established. David Sarnoff, then working for the Marconi
Wireless Telegraphy Company, wrote in 1915 about a Radio Music Box
that could become a household utility in the same sense as the piano or
phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless (Lubar,
1993: 213). However, this novel use for radio telephony was also imagined
as public: it wasnt just entertainment that the radio music box promised,

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but also baseball games, lectures, and events of national importance (Lubar,
1993: 213). It was not until 2 November 1920 that Westinghouse established the first commercial radio station, KDKA, and the first news broadcast by KDKA was the result of the 1920 presidential election.
Thus, radical and commercial innovators alike Brecht and Sarnoff
seemed to agree that radio was capable of mixing music and politics, home
entertainment and national events. Where they differed was in their attitude
to the two-way aspect of radio. Brecht wanted to exploit it; the broadcasters wanted to stamp it out. It has been estimated that in 1922 there were
15,000 transmitting stations in the USA, almost all of them run by amateurs, reaching perhaps 250,000 listeners. Steven Lubar (curator at the
Smithsonian Museum) comments: Most amateurs looked down on people
who just listened to broadcasts. Most of them believed that radio should be
an active medium of communication (Lubar, 1993: 214).
The eventual dominance of commercial broadcasting, as opposed to other
cultural forms, was not inherent in radio technology. Nor did radio arise
from an existing social need as Brecht pointed out, it was not the public
that waited for radio but radio that waited for a public (1979/80: 24). It
won that public by commercial methods in the USA and by the brute force
of monopoly in Britain a brute force that included the deliberate suppression of local radio stations by John Reiths BBC. The two-way possibilities of radio seemed to have ebbed away, remaining only as a technical
hobby for boys.

Radio and development

But it turned out (against Brechts expectations) that one-way broadcasting
was nevertheless able to perform the public service that early proponents
imagined for radio. Listeners liked the sense of imagined community provided by hearing the same sounds at the same time as millions of others.
Even the most domesticated form of light entertainment, the Radio Music
Box, was a different experience in kind from listening to the same music on
a phonograph. Radio became a prime site for the establishment of national
identity through national culture.
Through an enduring combination of music and actuality, radio came to
symbolize civil society and community during the modern broadcast era of
the nation-state. The democratic benefits of such an invention were enthusiastically exported. Short-wave radio teemed with national broadcasters talking to global listeners. The BBC World Service, Voice of America,
Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale and Radio Netherlands are
still the big five of international radio broadcasting, and still maintain a
rhetoric of democracy rather than commerce to justify their costs.
The early history of radio shows that the familiar cultural form of

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one-way broadcasting was not inevitable or even welcome to its early proponents. But at the same time it shows that the idea of combining music,
democracy, domesticity and radio predates the broadcast era. As the dominance of broadcasting is now under challenge from post-broadcast forms of
media, especially the Internet, the same combination seems to have survived
in rude good health. And as the dominance of the nation-state is at least in
question if not under attrition, new models of citizenship, community, civil
society and public communication are being evolved.
Some of these are very low-tech, low-cost solutions to problems of
development. While he was Deputy State President of South Africa in 1996,
Thabo Mbeki, speaking to the Commonwealth Press Union, argued for
radio as a key mechanism for growing civil society in post-apartheid South
Africa.2 He saw the need for the African National Congress government to
attend to the flow of information between government and people in a twoway exchange that went beyond merely using radio as a means of dissemination of government information. In conditions where literacy rates,
remoteness and lack of infrastructure made it difficult for a government to
assess what its voters wanted, what they liked or didnt like, Mbeki argued
strongly for state involvement in community radio, along with the development of privatized commercial radio in a diverse media environment.
One of the problems associated with that policy is technological. Trevor
Bayliss invention of the wind-up radio, and the subsequent manufacture of
the Freeplay by the Baygen company in South Africa, was one solution to
the problem of diffusing radio to remote communities.3 So elegant was this
solution that the radio won the BBC Designer of the Year competition for
Baylis in 1997.
In developmental terms, the Freeplay wind-up radio was in fact a tree.
When speaking of the educational legacy of apartheid South Africa, Mbeki
pointed out that among black teachers there was an 80:1 imbalance between
biblical studies teachers and mathematics teachers. There was a similar disproportion of sociologists over engineers. Mbeki commented that it is
better to have a good teacher under a tree than a bad teacher in a classroom. He saw the community radio as that good teacher, able to deliver
useful knowledge to under-resourced citizens in the name of civil society.
Baylis proved that the idea was practical, with a radio that can be thrown
out of an aeroplane, that runs on wrist-power and that is a design classic
into the bargain.

Nation-building and breaking

There are many other examples of the use of radio to form communities in
contexts where nation-building is either at an early stage or not relevant.
For instance, in Australia, the National Indigenous Radio Service and the

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National Indigenous Media Association of Australia (NIMAA) are building

a sense of community and communication for Aboriginal and Islander
people through dozens of local stations necklaced together into an alternative national broadcaster for the Indigenous nation. The SBS (the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service) is doing the same for so-called
NESBians (people of Non-English-Speaking background), who speak a language called LOTE (Language Other Than English). Triple J is a national
youth station run by the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
the antipodean equivalent of the BBC). Even academics have their own
station in Australia; its called ABC Radio National.
Of course, radio can be used in zones of conflict as well as for community
purposes, and it can be used to build communities of hate as well as other
more civil societies. There are examples from Rwanda, Angola, the former
Yugoslavia and elsewhere, including the so-called shock-jocks in the USA
and Australia, to remind us that the possibilities of radio can be pathological as well as healthy to the body politic. Its very ubiquity and ease of access
mean that it is available for the expression of freedoms of speech that are
literally hideous.
At the other extreme of the technological spectrum, radio has begun to
seep through the Internet. Jo Tacchis article (this issue), among others,
explores the potential for new modes and styles of social relationship established through Net radio. The Net may allow further development of those
two-way possibilities imagined by Bertolt Brecht more than 70 years ago.
Certainly it reformulates for a new generation of netizens the by-now quite
venerable fusion of sound and citizenship.
Such new senses of citizenship are increasingly being defined around identity, culture and lifestyle. Citizenship is not emancipated from ethnic and
territorial ties, nor from political and social rights and obligations, but there
is no doubt that the history of citizenship in the 20th century has seen, in
addition to those aspects, the development of much more fleeting voluntaristic and individual issues. Communities have formed around taste cultures. People have felt more strongly attached to virtual co-subjects who
share their identity than to their physical next-door-neighbours. Politics has
had to deal with a decline in its popularity among its own voters.4
In such unstable times, radiocracy is part of the process, evolving as a
diffused, two-way, voluntaristic, commercial, diverse and virtual bringing
together of music and community, entertainment and democracy.

Notes
1 John Humphrys is a BBC TV newsreader, and host of On the Record. He is
best known, however, as the long-serving presenter of the Today morning
show on BBC Radio 4. The Radiocracy conference opened with a plenary

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conversation between Humphrys and Ian Hargreaves, Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University. Humphrys was born and raised in Cardiff and holds
an honorary MA at Cardiff University. He is renowned in the UK for his trenchantly expressed views on, among other things, academic jargon in general
and media studies in particular.
2 Unbeknownst to him, Radiocracy was Mbekis brainchild. John Hartley and
Amanda Hopkinson were present at Mbekis speech to the Commonwealth
Press Union in Cape Town, and the idea for the Radiocracy conference was
hatched as we listened to his address.
3 Trevor Baylis, OBE, was a guest of the Radiocracy conference, where he was
awarded an Honorary Research Fellowship of the School of Journalism,
Media and Cultural Studies, in which the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media
Research, host of the conference, is located.
4 I have argued that television in particular is associated with the growth of
cultural citizenship and what Ive called DIY [do-it-yourself] citizenship
during the second half of the 20th century. The idea applies equally to radio,
which is equally implicated in the overlaying of identity and choice on top of
existing civic, political and social-welfare aspects of citizenship. See Hartley,
1999, especially chapters 1214.

References
Brecht, Bertolt (1979/80) Radio as a Means of Communication: A Talk on the
Function of Radio, Screen 20(3/4): 248.
Hartley, John (1999) Uses of Television. London and New York: Routledge.
Hood, Stuart (1979/80) Brecht on Radio, Screen 20(3/4): 1623.
Lubar, Steven (1993) Info-Culture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age
Inventions. Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin.

JOHN HARTLEY is Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and Dean of Arts at Queensland University of Technology. He is
author of Uses of Television (Routledge, 1999), co-editor of American
Cultural Studies: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2000) and co-author
of The Indigenous Public Sphere: The Reporting and Reception of
Aboriginal Affairs in the Australian Media (Oxford University Press,
2000). Address: Queensland University of Technology, PO Box 2434,

Brisbane 4001, Australia. [email: j.hartley@qut.edu.au]

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