When Radio Was New, When Social Media Was New

I. Radio

We're reviewing some history, The Master's Voice:

The Munich crisis was a milestone in radio history. Starting with the Austrian Anschluss in March of the same year, this was the first world diplomatic crisis to be played out at every step on the airwaves. Radio had reached maturity: in Europe and North America nearly every household owned or had access to a radio set ...

When the printing press gained wider adoption people reacted. By radio's arrival their eyes were immune to the newspaper hype, even breaking news "extra!"s in the morning, noon and evening editions. Then a new medium hit their ears:

It was during the crisis that the American radio networks more or less invented a format that we now take for granted in news broadcasting: the daily news round-up with live reports from around the world including breaking news as it happens, ...

Push alerts circa 1930s "we interrupt this broadcast..." must have been exciting back then, arriving more frequently than warranted. After a few years and one world war, people would build resistance to it (with the occasional flare-up, like 1990s Rwanda.) But then it was new:

Chamberlain had learned a lot from Goebbels, who had been intensely aware of the potential of radio from the moment he became propaganda minister in 1933. Goebbels defined radio as the main instrument of his propaganda policy, and Germany began broadcasting across the border to Czechoslovakia's 3.5m German speakers almost as soon as the Nazis came to power. As is so often the case of a somewhat cumbersome democratic state in the face of dictatorship, Czechoslovakia was agonizingly slow to recognize the danger of Nazi radio propaganda...

Why liken it to facebook? Because in some countries, most without net neutrality, facebook is free with a cell phone. Internet beyond the silo is available to some - for an extra charge.

The best immunity to fake news is regular interaction with regional news local news. A consumer reporter you write into. A TV station covering high school or college sports. "Our event was on abc-bayarea last night" or one paper that's printed a letter to the editor you or yours wrote. An outlet you'd made human contact with. Without that:

As late as 1938, less than eight percent of the broadcasts by Radiojournal - as Czechoslovak Radio was then known - were in German, although German speakers made up a quarter of the population.

Milena Jesenská, one of the most brilliant Czech journalists of her generation (most often remembered for her brief affair with Franz Kafka many years earlier) described the situation thus: "For five years all that people in the borderlands have had to do is to turn a switch and Nazi ideology from the German stations has flowed directly into their homes - it goes without saying that they all tuned into stations that they could understand! ... As a counter to this, all we offered was half an hour of German radio, most of it dull and indigestible. Only by now they are all perfectly schooled, sweet-talked and bullied, repeating parrot-fashion phrases about their national space."

II. Social Media (Facebook)

The "When Social Media Was New" history is being written today. Wave after wave, country after country. Again, in the US anyone today with a facebook account has access to the internet beyond one social media platform*. Citizens of many other countries' only view into the internet ends at the silo walls of facebook. Here is Nick Kristoff reporting from what he calls the Myanmar slow-motion genocide:

...Ordinary citizens often seem to have been manipulated by anti-Rohingya propaganda, particularly on Facebook. One moderate Rakhine village leader, U Maung Kyaw Nyunt, told me that the hatred toward the Rohingya has escalated because of the arrival of smartphones and Facebook, resulting in virulent anti-Rohingya propaganda depicting them as murderous terrorists who commit atrocities against Buddhists. 

“Young people are using their smartphones a lot,” he said. “They don’t see with their eyes; they just see with their phones.” 

“I have arguments with my son about this,” he said, adding, “Facebook has been bad for Myanmar.” 

The military has internet units trained by Russia, and one theory is that the army may be behind part of the social media campaign against the Rohingya. ...

It takes a while, for people to "see" or "hear" trolls on the new medium. In the US we're getting there. "Senator Feinstein fought to keep the Confederate Flag flying above City Hall when she was mayor. Don't vote for her!" <- We've figured out some are paid, or just bored, or missed their school's unit on the Civil War. And we've learned not to argue with them. Hear them with a grain of salt, don't internalize it and move on.


*This could change some after April 23 when the FCC's stops regulating the internet as a utility and takes a more hands-off approach in accordance with the repeal of Net Neutrality.