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Examining radio development over a long time span from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, in this article, we claim that radio history is broader than the history of broadcasting only. We suggest looking at radio history through the perspective of intermediality and inter-technology, drawing on five different examples: radiography, radiotelegraphy/radiotelephony, radar and satellites, radiomobile/mobile phones with regard to radio spectrum and packet radio networks, such as Wi-Fi. We demonstrate how and why these (and other) technologies should be considered parts of radio studies even though they do not represent classic examples of radio broadcasting. Overall, this intermedia and inter-technological perspective on radio history offers new ways of rethinking and reformulating the confines of radio studies, as well as contributes to a greater field of media studies.

At consumer and tech fairs, the future of digital technologies has always been imagined. In this study, we investigate how the annual CeBIT tech fair (held in Hanover, Germany, from 1986 to 2018) and a keynote speech given there by Bill Gates in 1995 have been constructed, framed, and substantiated through media coverage and in mediated memory. Thanks to a qualitative content analysis, based on more than 500 articles published in general interest media and technology magazines, the ways the future of digitization was, and partially still is, imagined and narrated at tech fairs emerge. It is a quasi-religious future, predicted in quasi-religious gatherings (the ‘Mecca’ of digital futures), where gurus (Messiahs) and new ideas emerged, are celebrated, criticized, or rejected. During fairs, there is also a political and strategic use of the future because the ways digitization is forecast can shape and drive its future through investments and obliged visions.

This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technic...

The main conference topic for the ECREA conference in Lugano addressed the many ways in which centers, cores and peripheries, and also mainstreams and alternatives are dealt with in academic media and communication research. The premise of this panel was to apply this general outline of the conference for academic introspection and to recount the many shifting centers and peripheries of communication research over time and discuss the redrawing of the contours of our expanding field. Less than two decades back, the question what the main subjects of media and communication inquiry were would have highlighted the centrality of (already slowly declining) mass media as the main pillars alongside journalism and public communication. Since then, the very notion of mediated communication has become less clear and has expanded to nearly all areas of the human experience and encompasses a variety of technologies, tools, platforms and intermediaries for communication.

Airspace today is densely penetrated by Wi-Fi networks, GPS services, and broadcasting and mobile phone signals. This process, what we call the mediatization of the air, is not so new, as it began in the first two decades of the 20th century, with the advent of wireless telegraphy. Based on archival research, this paper shows that wireless telegraphy mediatized the air and made it a matter of common interest for formerly-disconnected international realms. The mediatized air transformed meteorology, timekeeping, mobility, and transportation, and challenged governance over aerial borders. Overall, this historical study contributes to a different narrative about mediatization by including an invisible and understudied phenomenon that today represents a basic and taken-for- granted infrastructure for global communication.

This article has a double aim: one empirical–historical and one theoretical. First, it analyzes how the idea of an “alternative” use of wireless (namely, broadcasting) emerged and was debated inside the British Marconi Company in the first two decades of the 20th century. This historical part, based on unpublished sources preserved in the Marconi Archives, shows that this idea was (rationally) opposed by the majority of company’s management. Second, this article aims to place private companies at the center of media historiography, and more in general media studies, through a multifocal approach.

This chapter aims to deconstruct, mainly through a revision of scientific literature, the historical meanings of the term “media convergence” from the 1980s to the early 2010s. During these decades, media convergence has become more and more a popular buzzword in media studies and has been surrounded by the emergence of four different discourses and narratives. A technological narrative has focused on the coming together of different technical devices up to the so-called uberbox. An economic/market dimension has been symbolized by mergers and acquisitions among private companies in different sectors. A political/regulatory media convergence has become a common policy in different countries and institutions, willing to favor and, at the same time, to respond to market convergence. Finally, a cultural perspective has seen new users’ practices and new production and distribution of content as the key phenomena in media convergence.

This article proposes a methodology for studying the social history of telecommunications grounded in the interrelations and contaminations between Anglophone and Continental literature; its originality lies in the fact that it presents and discusses both traditions. Before tackling the central theme, the reasons for studying the history of telecommunications will be discussed and three different approaches will be considered. The first is the constructivist approach which, examines ‘relevant social groups’ and their decisions regarding telecommunications. The second is socio-economic and considers both path dependence theories and concepts useful in understanding the network economy: natural monopolies, economies of scale, externalities and public services. Finally, the macro-systemic approach will be considered. In our proposal these three approaches, deriving from both the Anglophone and Continental schools of thought, form a methodological basis for studying the history of telecommunications.

This article argues that the “double-birth” model proposed by Gaudreault and Marion provides a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how wireless telegraphy was developed and eventually re-invented during its early history. Drawing from a case study on the role played by Italian “radio amateurs” between 1900 and the early 1920s, we examine how such users shifted the medium's definition, legislation, and identity in the first years after the introduction of wireless technology. The emergence of new potential meanings and applications ultimately rebuilt and redefined this medium, creating space for innovation and multiple “births.”

This paper discusses how media theory and history should approach specimens of evidence about the cultural reception of media pertaining to the realms of the fantastic, such as speculations, predictions, dreams, and other forms of fantasy regarding media. It argues that the role of the imaginary in the history of media can be fully comprehended only by employing a perspective which is dynamic in time. In different phases of a medium's evolution, in fact, we find different fantasies; it follows that we need specific approaches to study them. The article discusses fantasies which are specific to three stages in media change: those preceding the actual invention of a medium; those accompanying the earliest period after the introduction of a new medium; and those connected to old media.

A conventional transmission electron microscope is used as a versatile optical bench in a setup where a pixel recording system, sensitive to single electrons, replaces the final viewing screen. Our detector is based on a custom CMOS chip of 4096 monolithic active pixels designed for applications in vertex detectors of future collider experiments. The chip is equipped with a fast read-out chain able to manage up to 10^8 frames per second. This capability permitted to collect high statistics samples of single electron events within a time interval where the stable operations and the coherence conditions of the microscope were guaranteed. The microscope was configured with an accelerating potential of 60 kV, hence leading to 60 keV electrons. The large fraction of empty events made possible to obtain measurements of the time distribution of electron arrivals and this is what really characterizes this work. In fact, for the first time, conventional interference patterns have been split into single-electron frames according to the time of arrival. In particular, the 4096-pixel sensor has been used to collect diffraction patterns of a single wire, a carbon grating and eventually to reproduce the Young-Feynman two-slit experiment with single electrons instead of light. The experiment has been carried out by inserting two nanometric slits—two 100 x 1500 nm slits, 500 nm spaced apart—in the microscope that provided the electron beam source and the electro-optical lenses for projecting and focusing the pattern on the sensor. The fast readout of the sensor allowed us to record single-electron frames, spaced by several empty frames, and this is an improvement over past single-electron interference works. In this way the time distribution of the single electron arrivals has been measured with a timing resolution of 160 us. This research might also open new detector investigation and development and characterization of pixel sensors.

The Telegraph Union, founded in 1865, was the first supranational organization to link different countries with the aim of regulating a public service. Its objectives were: technological standardization, a set of regulations and the adoption of uniform international tariffs. The paper aims to establish how the Telegraph Union influenced the technical standardization process of the international network in the second half of the XIX century.

Wireless telegraphy, born in late 19th century, was regulated at international level very soon in two conferences both held in Berlin in 1903 and 1906. These conferences were organized by Germany in order to break up the British Marconi Company's monopoly. Germany, France and U.S.A. opposed this trust, while U.K. and Italy defended it for different reasons. This paper aims to identify the political, economic, technical, and social reasons that led, or in some cases forced, Italy to protect Marconi's interests at international level. This defensive strategy put the country at the center either of the international debate on wireless, or of the Marconi Company's global strategy.

The evolution in both content and storage of information will change the way in which future media historians approach their task: in order to study the history of the mass media, telecommunications and new media of the late twentieth century, scholars will have to interact with digital sources, giving rise to a whole new series of concerns and questions. It is not clear if, how and in what format digital data will be available. What is the relationship between old and new sources? Who should be responsible for preserving the digital heritage? What should be preserved? How should digital data be preserved? All these questions are crucial for preservation strategies now and, above all, for studying media history in 2050.

In light of emerging forms of software, interfaces, cultures of uses, and media practices associated with mobile media, this collection investigates the various ways in which mobile media is developing in different cultural, linguistic, social, and national settings. We consider the promises and politics of mobile media and its role in the dynamic social and gender relations configured in the boundaries between public and private spheres. In turn, the contributors revise the cultural and technological politics of mobiles. The collection is genuinely interdisciplinary, as well as international in its range, with contributors and studies from China, Japan, Korea, Italy, Norway, France, Belgium, Britain, and Australia.

Concepts and structures of broadcasting did not suddenly appear during the 1920s with radio, but were inherited from the so-called "circular telephone." Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the telephone was used as both a point-to-point and a broadcasting medium in France, Britain, Hungary, the United States and Italy. This paper focuses on the Italian case, the so-called Araldo Telefonico. Appearing in Rome in the 1910s thanks to engineer Luigi Ranieri, its schedule included educational, informational and entertainment programs. After World War I, the circular telephone was launched in Milan and Bologna. Araldo Telefonico and its wireless brother Radio Araldo were also involved in negotiations establishing the first Italian radio company, URI (forefather of today's public broadcasting company, RAI). This article narrates the history of a dead medium in Italy and highlights its relevance for radio and media history more generally.