Excerpted from
http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-reading-for-your-winter-blues/274251The creation and subsequent expansion of the low-power FM service were notable wins for activists who’d been dismissed by many radio people as loud, annoying, piratical and quixotic.
Christina Dunbar-Hester, who teaches journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, offers us “Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest and Politics in FM Radio Activism.”
Her aim is to examine the practices of the activist organization Prometheus Radio Project in the early period of the LPFM rollout, roughly 2003 to 2007. “This book traces their activities with an eye to the intersection of technical practice and political engagement,” she writes. “It specifically investigates how the radio activists imputed emancipatory politics to radio technology — notably, an ‘old’ medium — against a shifting technical and political landscape that included increasing attention to Internet-based technologies.”
Very evident throughout is the intense symbolism many participants place on their role in the low-power movement. For them, the challenges of building or launching a low-power station go far beyond raising money or a studio roof. LPFM for them was about democracy, autonomy, social change and community self-determination.
The book is a work of ethnography, which is a scientific study of human social phenomena and communities often done through fieldwork. This is not intended as a light beach read. The text is academic in style and counter-culture in sympathy. Her style may grate for readers not patient with scholarly musings about such things as “social identity,” “cultural mediation of technology” and “utopian/dystopian rhetorics.”
For example, though I was intrigued by an essay about gender roles in building LPFM stations and a discussion of “the quietly competitive dynamic forged by the men in the group,” I was impatient with some of the conclusions, which could be boiled down to the fact that women and men learn differently. It’s hardly surprising to me that “even among feminist men, their culture of hardware tinkering did not succeed in the abolition of ‘masculine’ identity displays.” But I commend the author for exploring questions about the linkage of masculinity and technology. To paraphrase an organizer cited in the book: Why is it so hard to find non-dude engineers?
Gender is but one angle of the text. You will enjoy this work if you like discussing technology’s role in activist politics or if you are interested in how the Prometheus vision for media differs from that of, say, NPR.
The hardback book retails for $36. It is part of the Inside Technology Series from MIT Press Books.
Topic: Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest and Politics in FM Radio Activism (Read 1087 times)
