aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Podcasting Broadcasting & RCA-casting

When I worked in Public Access Television I believed that it could be a return to the conception of broadcasting that held sway at its birth: television as an educational instrument; television as a way to foster a more responsive government; television as a tool for the ordinary citizen; and television as a means to a more democratic culture.

Last September at a Duke University Podcasting Symposium (that I listened to via podcast, while painting my house), Jonathan Sterne voiced essentially the same belief about podcasting.

Sterne says he doesn’t like the term podcasting and argues that it should rightfully be called broadcasting, while what we have come to believe is broadcasting should be called RCA Casting because it is a centrally controlled corporate model (founded and propounded by RCA) that explicitly excludes anyone who was not professional. Like podcasting today…

In the early days of radio it was dominated by amateurs and… hobbyists and it was somewhat chaotic. People did what they wanted… There were different names for radio in this early period - wireless telephony, wireless telegraphy, radio telephony and so on and so forth. But between about 1922 and 1934 RCA’s model of broadcasting gets defined as the natural model for radio… Receiving only sets...became the dominant form of radio that people acquired purchased and encountered in their every day lives. The other thing is that amateur broadcasters were edged out by stations that had larger transmitters and by regulators that gave most of the spectrum to professional broadcasters. So in other words, whereas in 1925, professional broadcasters might shut down in a city on Tuesday night for amateur night… by 1929 that didn’t happen anymore.

Listen to the talk, very interesting. His appears to be a message of cautious optimism for the future of citizen produced media via whatever name podcasting will eventually come to be known as. He’s confident it won’t be podcasting:

Can the name be changed? Yes and it probably will be if history is any indication. Podcasting is a year old. Let’s talk about other media techniques when they were a year old… Radio didn’t become radio until the 1920s, actually quite late. People called it wireless for some time. So will it stay podcasting, no, not necessarily. And one of the reasons it’s important for me to come to a podcasting conference and call it broadcasting is maybe some podcasters will go back and start calling it broadcasting. And say all we’re doing is broadcasting on the Internet and we have the same rights and should have the same legitimacy as the people who previously held the monopoly on the term.