Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
submarine cables, allowed Marconi's company to achieve near-total domin-
ance over wireless radio in its early years, and encouraged leadership in the
industry to pass to the U.S. By 1910, Federal Telegraph o
ered wireless tel-
ephony between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and soon thereafter
the U.S. Navy became the
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firm's largest customer. The Navy, seeking to
exploit wireless technology and circumvent the British monopoly, also facili-
tated the rise in 1920 of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which
was created from General Electric's takeover of the American branch of
Marconi's
fi
rm.
Between 1893 and World War I, many nation-states began to create
national radio broadcasting systems carrying news and entertainment, weld-
ing national audiences together through the shared experience of listening to
programs. Radio became a medium of entertainment in its own right, the
fi
rst
electronic medium to create shared experiences of news and entertainment
among mass audiences. Immediately, corporate capital moved to exploit the
new market; thus RCA, formed initially to provide transatlantic telegraphy,
plunged into the lucrative industry. Programs hosted by soap companies, later
known as “soap operas,” generated an early form of virtual community much
as television would do after WWII. By the 1930s, almost every home in the
industrialized world possessed a radio. In 1954, the
fi
first transistor radios
made the device even more cheap and portable, facilitating the di
fi
ff
usion of
news and entertainment to millions, then billions, of people.
As with telephony, the state played a signi
cant role in the formation and
governance of wireless radio networks. As wireless technologies became
widespread, the
fi
first International Conference on Wireless Telegraphy was
held in Berlin in 1903 to regulate the medium. By World War I, wireless
telegraphy had become an integral part of every political party's military
apparatus. After the war, broadcast radio adopted the medium and com-
mercialized a large part of the available electromagnetic spectrum. In the
1920s, Vatican Radio became the
fi
first international broadcasting network. In
short, like the telegraph and telephone, the development of wireless technol-
ogy, and its associated time-space impacts, is inseparable from the political
dynamics of the world-system. What began as a tool used primarily by rail-
roads di
fi
used to become a popular household good. Moreover, wireless
telegraphy laid the groundwork for radar in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, the
implications of the nineteenth-century round of time-space compression
reverberated well into the twentieth, forming complex palimpsests in which
multiple historical realities became sedimented into one another.
ff
City life in the transition to late modernity
Explosive urbanization was a key feature of rapidly industrializing societies,
and represented a wave of time-space compression that catapulted hundreds
of millions of people from the quiet, staid backwaters of country life into the
hustle and bustle of crowded metropolises. Driven by the throbbing engines of
the Industrial Revolution, most societies in Western Europe, North America,
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