'The Marvel of our Time': Visions about radio broadcasting in the Flemish Catholic Press, 1923-1936, paper presented at the 25th IAMCR conference, Paris, 23-25 July 2007

The introduction of new information and communication technologies and the Internet was surrounded by utopian and dystopian visions concerning their societal impact. These claims not only puzzle media historians because of their media deterministic character, but also because they are ahistorical. The introduction of new media in the past was also accompanied by optimistic and fearful predictions. Despite the fact that media historians have noticed these ambivalent popular feelings, studies that have systematically investigated the public debate about new media in the past are only recently undertaken. Writing from a perspective of a history from below instead of one from above and thus shifting attention away from more traditional media histories that studied media institutions like national broadcasters or the press landscape, an analysis of the past popular debates about once new media forces media historians to incorporate into their research corpus all too often ignored sources (newspapers, advertisements, magazines) that bear popular visions about these new media.

The case study in this paper is one part of a broader PhD-project that investigates the popular expectations in Belgium with the introduction of radio (from 1923 to 1936) and television broadcasting (from 1953 to 1960). In this paper we will analyse the popular reception of radio broadcasting in Belgium by means of an analysis of the visions found in the articles of the Flemish catholic radio magazine Radio between 1923 (the year of the introduction of radio broadcasting in Belgium) and 1928 (the year in which the founder and editor of Radio died). The focus on radio is relevant because, compared to the history of the press, film or television, media historical attention towards this medium has been until recently rather marginal.

In this paper, we will first give an overview of the societal developments as well as the technological history of radio since both aspects shaped the broader context in which the popular debates about radio broadcasting in Belgium emerged. Secondly, within this contextual background, the specific characteristics of the magazine Radio as belonging to the catholic pillar in Belgian society will be highlighted. We will further analyse what the background was of the journalists that commented on radio development in Radio. The third section finally analyses the visions found in Radio and relate these to the journalists and the contextual perspectives developed in the two previous sections. By means of this historical analysis, we hope to be able to demystify current revolutionary claims about new media by pointing to some continuities in discourses surrounding the introduction of radio broadcasting and the Internet, while acknowledging that history never repeats itself.