Abstract
Low Power to the People focuses on the Prometheus Radio Project, a Philadelphia-based media reform group that had its origins in the pirate radio upsurge of the 1990s. After the FCC shut down their station in 1998, these pirates turned their attention to media policy activism—in particular to promoting low-power FM by lobbying to expand opportunities for legal broadcasting and by providing technical and other assistance to community organizations interested in radio. The book also explores issues of identity (gender and geek, activist and expert) and technology, how Prometheus navigates the tensions between its political and technical objectives, its conception of radio as a medium for creating and maintaining community, and the politics of radio in the 21st century.
The activists who founded Prometheus consciously set out to demystify and democratize technology. They were embedded in a do-it-yourself culture deeply committed to skills sharing, and to overcoming often-gendered divisions of labor that concentrate expertise, and hence power. But for many of the constituencies Prometheus served such considerations were at best secondary—they were primarily interested in communicating and community building. Dunbar-Hester documents a persistent tension between these objectives. Many of those most committed to local radio broadcasting have few technical skills or, more critically, a deep desire to acquire them; those prepared to lend their technical skills are often not experienced teachers and are eager to get on with the work. As a result, the skill sharing that characterizes Prometheus’ work often has a largely symbolic character.
Outside of the low-power and pirate radio movement, Prometheus is probably best known as the lead plaintiff in a successful legal challenge to the FCC’s dismantling of ownership limits. At its peak, Prometheus had a half-dozen paid staff and a larger pool of volunteers working out of its offices in the basement of a West Philadelphia church. These served clusters of radio activists around the country who Prometheus assisted with seeking low-power FM broadcast licenses, and then helping successful applicants build their stations and start broadcasting.
Christina Dunbar-Hester is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Low Power to the People is based on ethnographic research from 2003 to 2007, supplemented by interviews and documentary research. Although she now teaches in a communications program, she originally approached the subject as part of doctoral research in science and technology studies. As a result, there is much stronger emphasis on questions of identity, gender, pedagogy, and the social construction of technology.
The activists who launched Prometheus had broader interests in technology and do-it-yourself culture. But they chose to focus their activism specifically on radio, seeing it as a medium rooted in local communities, affordable, and capable of being highly democratic. Democratic in part because (regulatory barriers aside) anyone who can speak into a microphone or spin a turntable can create a radio program, very little infrastructure or equipment is needed, and operating costs are low. Even the technology involved in setting up and maintaining stations is relatively familiar and simple to operate, and many community and low-power radio stations rely on self-taught volunteers to build and maintain broadcasting equipment and studios. (Prometheus has also done some work, discussed in Chapter 7, with community Wi-Fi networks, sometimes struggling to reconcile its conception of democratic communications technology—focused on local, face-to-face, access and control—with the goals of its partners. Its focus is on community building and process rather than on content, and so the organization has been wary of webcasting and other technologies difficult to reconcile with their vision of locally controlled, accessible communications.)
Prometheus actively works to make technology accessible. Volunteers were enlisted to solder circuit boards not because this was a particularly cheap or efficient way to acquire the necessary equipment but rather to demystify the technology. Entire communities were enlisted in the work of building stations and putting them on air as part of a conscious effort to break down technical barriers and create an ethos of shared ownership and responsibility.
Much of this remained at the level of aspirations. Despite Prometheus’s efforts to break down gender and racial norms around technical expertise, and to incorporate novices into every stage of the work, people tended to fall back into familiar roles. Even technicians committed to sharing skills could become brusque when interrupted by novices trying to understand what they were doing. Expertise and professionalization were imposed not only by the need to raise funds and to deal with bureaucracies and regulators, but also by the exigencies of getting a new station on the air.
Low Power to the People offers a richly detailed exploration of the struggle for low-power FM as it played out both at the grassroots level and in the halls of Washington, and also nuanced reflections on the contradictions and challenges implicit in building democratic media organizations that must simultaneously navigate technical and regulatory issues, and balance commitments to access with the reality of uneven expertise.
In the process, Dunbar-Hester offers a convincing argument that an “old” medium like radio has the potential to be at least as open and democratic as does the Internet, and that we need to more critically examine claims about the intrinsic character of different communications technologies. It is a complex, layered book that will reward careful reading and reflection. It should prove of as much interest to digital utopianists as to critics, to critical scholars of technology and to those committed to rebuilding the public sphere in material, local spaces.