Wireless telephone, materiality, and making of the national auditory in Turkey

In: Media, Culture & Society, Band 45, Heft 6, S. 1225-1241

Abstract

This paper focuses on the radio's novelty years in 1920s Turkey to examine how the functions of wireless technology as a material artifact are negotiated in ways that fashion a national auditory. Most studies on radio's history prioritize sound, eliding people's tinkering with the wireless as a technical object. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, I suggest that early radio as a material object required as much of its listeners' attention as did the broadcast content. In young Turkey's war-torn economy, the only affordable way to listen to radio was learning how to assemble a receiver. Few owners of manufactured radios also learnt how to fix frequent problems. To form a passive national auditory, the state monitored the cultivation of these technical skills by banning transmitter-construction while encouraging assembling/fixing receivers. In addition to the body's visceral/affective capacities, then, nation-states also discipline technical skills while forming a national auditory.