Broadcasting

In NBC: America's Network, Michele Hilmes illustrates how the naming of NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, contains the core characteristics that broadcasting would take on in America. "First, national: when RCA announced the formation of its new radio "chain" in 1926, it introduced the first medium that could, through its local stations, connect the scattered and disparate communities of a vast nation simultaneously and address the nation as a whole...Second, broadcasting: this word was coined to denote a new form of communication that emerged in the early 1920s, one that emanated invisibly from a central source and passed with ease though not only physical but social and cultural barriers to reach listeners as private individuals in their homes. More accessible, more exotic (where did that distant station come from?), yet more intimate than any former medium, it created new forms of community and now modes of creative expression. Third, company: In the United States, unlike most of the rest of the world, broadcasting would develop as a primarily private owned enterprise, a business responding to market conditions rather than an organ of the state or a public service institution."¹

Her analysis concentrates on the American broadcast system: this dossier focuses on those central characteristics of the distribution model: travel over distance, simultaneity of time, and consistency of content. This "obvious" modus operandi emerged during a worldwide paradigm shift toward nation stabilization as a result of the horror of World War I and entering World War II on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Mussolini was quoted as saying that without radio he would not have been able to achieve the solidification of and power over the Italian people that he did, and the Fireside Chat over radio is frequently thought of as having vastly strengthened President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popularity and influence with the American people.²

Broadcasting is a living industry and technical model, but substantial moves away from these key characteristics have effectively rendered the broadcasting mentality dead.

Development and Remediation

Defining characteristics of broadcasting existed in a variety of mediums longs before Guglielmo Marconi's sending and receiving the first wireless signals in 1895.

References

1 Hilmes. Michele and Henry, Michael Lowell. NBC: America's Network. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007. Italics original.

2 Hillard, p1