The technology for radio was more or less ordered into a mass medium by the American involvement in World War I. "The Great War, as it came to be called, altered the nature of radio, just as radio began to alter the nature of war. In the United States, radio became an official interest of the government. Stations were commandeered; operators were trained by the thousands; patent suits that had hindered radio's development were put in abeyance; equipment was standardized; new equipment was developed; and orders for manufacture multiplied" (Lewis 1991, 121).
Radio eventually altered the very nature of American culture and the way its citizens spent their free time. "Radio was in fact the first mass medium. Radio made America into a land of listeners, entertaining and educating, angering and delighting, and joining every age and class into a common culture" (Lewis 1991, 2). Before it could achieve such status, however, radio had to endure a period of novelty where amateurs and hobbyists fiddled with their primitive sets. There are remarkable parallels between the early days of radio and the current lack of direction for the "Information Superhighway."
"Radio was fast becoming a craze. People were finding that with a spool of wire, a cylindrical oatmeal box, a crystal, an aerial, and earphones, they too, could listen in. Everyone from cabinet makers to machinists was willing to supply them with the requisite parts, even entire receivers" (Lewis 1991, 153). In its novelty, a similar rush for cyberspace is happening today. The connections are made up of UNIX systems, IBMs and compatibles, Macintoshes, telephone lines, television satellites, cables and fiber optic networks.
Radio manufacturers were going into business everywhere, and broadcasting became a function for all sorts of unlikely institutions. "Overnight, it seemed, everyone had gone into broadcasting: newspapers, banks, public utilities, department stores, universities and colleges, cities and towns, pharmacies, creameries, and hospitals, among others" (Lewis 1991, 163). Anyone who has spent time navigating the World Wide Web could quickly see the parallels. Web "home pages" are being produced by these same institutions as well as individuals. In addition, there are hundreds of on-line services available to choose from.
"Early radio stations experimented with different programming formats, unsure of how the medium would evolve, and of what radio was really for" (Mulgan 1991, 205). Lacking regulation, the numbers of broadcasters skyrocketed out of control. The government began to worry about "etheric bedlam" from so many stations and amateur "hams" all broadcasting at the same time (Mulgan 1991, 205). Out of 21,065 transmitting radio stations in 1922, 16,898 were amateur stations (Mulgan 1991, 206). "It was soon clear that some form of regulation or oversight was needed to bring stability to the industry, to prevent interference between signals and the practice of using higher-powered transmitters to eliminate a competitor's signals" (Mulgan 1991, 206). The parallels to the current state of the Internet are obvious. Internet connections come from the government, businesses, universities, and commercial services like Colorado SuperNet. The on-line database services like Prodigy and CompuServe are beginning to supply Internet access as well. As of now, there is no regulation to define or control these institutions and no clear guidelines or laws concerning the content of their information.
With radio, the government stepped in with the 1927 Radio Act and the 1934 Communications Act, which established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the electromagnetic spectrum. It may soon be necessary to redefine these acts, or create a "Federal Cyberspace Commission" to regulate the anarchy of computer networks today.
Another unanswered question during the early radio days was how it would be paid for. The first radio broadcasts were produced by radio manufacturers as an incentive to buy their equipment (Mulgan 1991, 205). David Sarnoff, founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), was strongly opposed to any type of advertising. Toll radio, sponsorship and license fee finance were all tried before advertising became the predominant method of cost control. Today the Internet community is strongly opposed to advertising. Some on-line services have advertising. Some are funded by their subscription fees and connect-time charges. The computers that form the backbone of the Internet are mostly government-owned, and, therefore, taxpayer financed.
As with computers, women had a doubtful relationship with radio for a while. "The early radio, for example, was resisted by women as an unwelcome intrusion; later the television set came to be seen as disruptive of child-rearing and marital relations, distracting women from their proper tasks" (Mulgan 1991, 62). Radio and television eventually came to be accepted by women as a welcome addition to home life (Mulgan 1991, 62).
In the 1990s, radio has come full circle with the advent of "packet radio." Packet radio is a means by which amateur radio hams communicate with one-another via computers using the Internet (Saunders 1995, E1). Packet radio hams hook their radio sets up to a laptop computer with a modem-like device and create their messages, which then get translated into radio waves and broadcast. Other radios with similar equipment can receive and translate the signals back into text. (Saunders 1995, E1.) Because the technology does not depend on the phone lines, it is particularly useful during disasters, where phones are one of the first things to go (Saunders 1995, E1). Packet radio hams were the first to transmit information from Kobe, Japan, after the January 1995 earthquake (Saunders 1995, E1).