Radio Space: “wireless in your psyche”
Author: redactie redactie
In the Grote Zaal of the Balie a presentation on the joys of radio by Daoud Kuttab, Arun Mehta, Adam Hyde and Pit Schultz, moderated by Jo van der Spek.
To get us in the mood Jo counted us 1,2,3, into the “Taliban Song” (…I love my papa, I love my mama, but most of all I love Osama) just a particular example of what wartime radio can contribute. Apparently this song was played on Zagreb’s independent radio station Radio 101, which during the recent Balkan war played an important role in broadcasting news that wasn’t manipulated by the government propaganda machine. By passing on telephone signals a bridge was made between Lubljana and Amsterdam radio stations: this hybrid form of wireless and wired media made an extension possible from the local to the global, before the internet had spread its web over the world. This tactical mix of elderly, old and new media was the crucial topic in the Radio Space debate this afternoon.
Radio is not an extinct animal yet and has many advantages: it’s cheap, it’s terrestrial and easy to carry around. The internet, on the other hand is exclusive, unattractive, labyrinthic and full of creepy diseases. Let’s carry this simplification further and say yes, radio is the poor man’s window on the world, an indispensable pet even, and the web is a monstrous and overrated bubble. This extrapolated comparison was not expressed as such, but certainly looming over the discussion, and it seems that the internet will be tolerated by state of the art radiomakers, but only as a transit station; a fast connection that can boost data from low powered mini-fm. Or in the case of Palestinian journalist and founder of internet-radio AmmanNet a way to get round Palestinian frequency legislation.
Ammannet’s aspirations are deeply local, not because the signal is restricted to a small area, but to create an alternative to diasporic satellite tv such as Al-Jazeera. When asked if Mr. Jasser Arafat would take advantage of his exile by appearing on AmmanNet, Daoud responded Arafat would rather die than leave Palestina and interviewing a corpse is not an option.
Is this radio-optimism versus a scepticism about the mediagenic qualities of internet a form of regression coming from a bunch of nostalgic middle-aged men or a pragmatic re-evaluation of technological progress? Certainly one can only be curious about creative media-cocktails such as community radio surfing or recycling Linux source code as elevator music.
Sarah van Lamsweerd