Plausible Histories?
This week’s question: Douglas has written an explanation of the social construction of radio in order to avoid technological determinism. The "constructors" proposed in this book are inventors, the press, amateur operators, the military, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and others. One sure way to avoid "determinism" is to advance a narrative that contains more than one possible outcome. Can you use the materials in this book to propose a plausible alternative way that radio might have developed in the U.S.? If yes, explain the alternative. If not, discuss what information you would need in order to propose an alternative (that is, information that you don't have in this book).
In Susan J. Douglas’ work Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922, she reveals in precise detail the influences of a wide range of disparate actors and forces ranging from individual inventors and corporations to social and military institutions to political organizations with the role that they played in shaping the modern practice of radio. Her approach seems exhaustive and thorough, with particular attention being paid to the larger social and cultural climate within the United States during these nascent years for wireless and later, radio technology. Her scholarship is well in line with the German historian Leopold von Ranke who was attempting to bring a new “scientific” level of rigor to the practice, “to essentially tell history as it was”. However by supplying such a well documented approach to the social, technological, cultural, economic, political and the personal histories that formed radio it is exceedingly difficult to imagine the technology emerging or developing in any other way. Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 implies that a multitude of possible tangents that could have affected the development of radio, but I see the true strength of Douglas’ work being a comprehensive survey of all those factors, and clearly indicating that the specific outcome of events in her text is how radio developed.
While Douglas’ approach removes the idea of technological determinism, that is that technology itself forms the very structure of its own development and advancement, it makes the development of radio appear both haphazard and yet completely determined by the previously mentioned forces. Would the course of Radio’s history be different if the Titanic had not struck the iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland? What if Harlod Cottam had performed his “time rush” ten minutes before on board the Carpathia, thus missing the SOS issued by the Titanic? What if the Titanic’s wireless operator, Jack Philips obeyed a direct order and abandoned ship when instructed, thus preventing the plea of assistance from being heard? What if the closest ship to the Titanic, the California still had their wireless operator at his post when the Titanic sent out her distress call? With any single change in the course of the Titanic tragedy be it magnifying or reducing the loss of human lives, one could surmise that it would have an affect on the course of development of wireless and radio technologies and policy.
However, what if the historical change was a relatively minor one, say that a Marconi operator decided to go against company policy and responded to the Deutschland’s wireless message despite it being broadcast using Slaby-Arco set? What if Lee DeForest was not so preoccupied with fame and fortune and refused to enter into the shady business relationship with Abraham White? The impacts of these “possible” minor changes are not so clear, and are fully open to interpretation and speculation. Perhaps the most revealing and surprising account in Douglas’ work is the fact that AT&T (with RCA and GE lurking in the background) was the entity first capable of broadcasting the human voice across the Atlantic. Her account up until that point in the text seemingly downplayed American Telephone and Telegraph to being only concerned with communication over wires, and thus was largely ignored in the development of wireless technology. Douglas’ account of AT&T in the development of wireless technology, in my opinion, was to specifically highlight the rise of power that corporations had in this nascent industry and how feelings of nationalism required that the technology itself reside within American corporate hands rather than the hands of American inventors.