.jpg)
|
The 99-Percent Invisible Podcast is always great, but a recent episode about short-wave radio really caught my attention. Short-wave radio is a band of radio that uses waves that are, as the name implies, really short. Shorter than AM/FM radio. Because long waves generally travel farther, a lot of folks wrote short-wave radio bands off under the assumption that they wouldn't travel very far at all and were basically useless. But kind of by accident, hobbyists discovered that the short wave pattern would actually bounce off of ionosphere above earth and bounce back down, allowing it to "cheat" and travel extremely far distances. Back in the pre-WWII era, hobbyists in Australia reported getting a broadcast from the east coast of the United States. This Wild West era of short-wave radio was a lot like the early world wide web. It connected people, most amateurs with a passion for nerdy tech, from around the globe. And then government got its hands on it. During WWII and into the Cold War era, governments started using short-wave radio to spread propaganda into other countries. Germany would broadcast English-language Nazi shit into the US. The US would broadcast "pro-freedom" shows and rock music into communist countries like Russia and Cuba. Today, short-wave radio still exists, and governments still use it to spread propaganda into countries where internet access is tightly restricted. The whole episode is worth a listen. It's both interesting and deeply saddening to see how much the world wide web followed the same pattern from nerdy hobbyist to mainstream to propaganda tool, when both technologies had so much potential to bring people together. Like this? A Go Make Things membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content. Cheers, Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser. |
0 Komentar untuk "[Go Make Things] Short-wave radio: the original internet"