Dee Blind Mice

I’m reading The Master Switch by Tim Wu. It’s really great, well worth a read. In one of the early chapters he talks about the early days of radio and how amateur radio enthusiasts came up with the idea of broadcasting – metaphorically casting the seed of their message broadly.

How did people come to think of themselves as speaking to anyone who might be listening? At first people were using radio kits to talk to each other. But at some point some of them started talking to an audience rather than a group of people. And unlike a theatre audience, or a group of people gathered around to hear a speech from the bema, this was an entirely imagined audience – you couldn’t see them or hear them, smell them, feed off their reactions. You just had to imagine that they were there and act as though they were listening.

It’s an interesting conceptual leap to realise you have the means to talk and potentially have many, distant people listen to what you say. What would you tell them? How would you present yourself?

The ability to send you message to an audience, rather than to one or more people in the same location, came with writing. That was one of the reasons Socrates was suspicious of it as a technology. Speech is direct, you must engage with the person you are speaking to. But the written word is a medium that comes between the person sending the message and the person receiving it.

Writing necessarily involved a delay though – you wrote your diary to be discovered after your death, or your book to be read after it was published. The early radio amateurs realised that they could talk to an audience that was distant, and potentially huge, but do it live. And do it using their own voices. It must have been an amazing thing to experiment with.

That’s what’s so great about the Internet – it has made the written word instant. Social media makes it easy to broadcast a message with the option of immediate interaction with people who want to respond. There’s a lot of talk about how the Internet has done away with the idea of “the audience”, but in some ways it has just made it easier for everyone to imagine themselves their own audience. And I suppose that changes the concept in a very fundamental way.