Background: The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is an emergency broadcasting infrastructure that originated in American radio and serves as the basis for systems in newer media and in Canada. Its design of self-propagating acoustic signals anticipates a nation-scale catastrophe but also subordinates smaller crises. Analysis: Adopting theory from infrastructural media studies, this article examines the reasoning and functionality evident in regulatory proceedings, broadcaster and media researcher assessments, and the sonic structure of test and warning signals. Conclusion and implications: A machinic approach to addressing media publics took shape in the acoustic operations of the EAS. Tied to a deregulatory drive that has eroded radio’s emergency function, the EAS produces a suspended temporality that must be understood as a combined effect of the infrastructure, its content, and its context. Contexte : L’Emergency Alert System (EAS) est un système de radiodiffusion d’urgence qui a pris naissance dans la radio américaine et qui a servi de base pour des systèmes adaptés à des médias plus récents ainsi que pour des systèmes canadiens. Conçu sous forme de signaux acoustiques qui s’autopropagent, il peut prévoir une catastrophe à l’échelle nationale mais en même temps il subordonne de plus petites crises. Analyse : Cet article emprunte certaines théories des études sur les infrastructures médiatiques pour examiner le raisonnement et la fonctionnalité présentes dans les procédures réglementaires, les évaluations par les radiodiffuseurs et par les chercheurs en médias, et la structure sonique de signaux d’essai et d’avertissement. Conclusion et implications : Les opérations acoustiques de l’EAS ont permis le développement d’une approche machinique pour s’adresser aux publics médiatiques. Dans le contexte d’un élan de déréglementation qui a diminué la fonction d’urgence de la radio, l’EAS produit une temporalité suspendue qu’il faut comprendre comme étant l’effet cumulatif de l’infrastructure, de son contenu et de son contexte.
No abstract
Wave Farm is a nonprofit organization that sponsors and preserves transmission art—a category that the organization has defined wherein artists and artworks intervene in the electromagnetic spectrum as a creative medium. In this essay, Andy Stuhl reflects on Wave Farm’s 25-year history from two vantage points: as a researcher of recent American radio history in which Wave Farm has played an active role, and also as the 2021–22 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. The Radio Artist Fellowship is a recent initiative by Wave Farm that has increased the organization’s role in archiving an artistic genre that previously lacked institutional support in the United States, and it has brought Wave Farm into greater contact with scholarly radio studies. Moving through the various phases of the nine-month fellowship, the essay pans out to show how radio studies, Wave Farm, and the radio medium as a whole have undergone significant and interconnected changes over the past 25 years.
Rivendell, a free and open source software suite for automated radio broadcasting, has brought several groups with clashing stances on technology, communication, and cultural politics into cooperation. This paper treats Rivendell as an opening onto the politics at play when the liberal ethos propelling free and open source software (Coleman, 2013) meets the autonomy-prizing traditions of independent broadcasting within an automation system. Complicating this already tense juncture, Rivendell has drawn users and code contributors from drastically opposed political groups within American broadcastings—right-wing Christian talk radio networks and progressive community stations—and has sustained a difficult terrain of working compromise that the activist push for low-power FM broadcasting inaugurated (Dunbar-Hester, 2014). In this paper, analysis of Rivendell's open source code base sheds light on its development and helps connect it to longer histories of media automation and its attendant social frictions. Interviews with lead Rivendell developers complete the picture of the project's trajectory, of its relation to the religious right context where the project began, and of the negotiations that have played out among its developers and its community of users in terrestrial and internet radio. The ongoing compromises and tensions threaded through Rivendell can offer insight into an issue that becomes larger and more pressing as media become increasingly complex and networked: how artists, activists, and media technologists who prioritize independence have reckoned with their reliance on socio-technical infrastructures whose connections may strike them as far less than savory.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.