Book review of Low Power to the People

Review of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the…[Read more]

En el aniversario del primer siglo de radiodifusión, este artículo analiza la formación de la radiodifusión en los Estados Unidos, y los movimientos de radio libre, micro-radio y FM de baja potencia (LPFM) como momentos clave de la radiodifusión a pequeña escala y no comercial. Introducido en el año 2000, el servicio de LPFM contiene leccio…[Read more]

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

Reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism.

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

Are the “media reform,” “media democracy,” and “media justice” movements complementary or in conflict? A bit of both, asserts the author, building on her earlier ethnographic study in the field. While each is a form of social activism with progressive political goals, they have different theoretical foundations and different frames for their respe…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This chapter examines DIY (do-it-yourself) politics in the realm of practice. To do this, it follows the work of a group of media activists whose work foregrounded engagement with communication technologies. Working in a self-consciously collaborative mode, the activists promoted hands-on work with radio and Internet hardware as a means to enact…[Read more]

Keyword entry on the term “geek”, exploring its drift over time from circus performer to weak person to technological enthusiast, tracing evolution over history of radio and computing.

This paper examines imaginaries of work and labor in “open technology” projects (especially open source software and hackerspaces), based on ethnographic research in North America. It zeroes in on “diversity initiatives” within open technology projects. These initiatives are important because they expose many of the assumptions and tension…[Read more]

This article contextualizes discourses surrounding new media technologies by examining activism around community media, using as a case study an activist group that has advocated for greater citizen access to low-power FM (LPFM) radio since the mid-1990s. It argues that the significance of new and emerging communication technologies can be grasped…[Read more]

This article follows media activists trying to transform the media system by broadening access to technology and skills. These activists intend for tech- nological engagement to be compatible with a range of social identities, but their hopes are not always achieved. It is difficult to cultivate forms of technical affinity and expertise not…[Read more]

Traces collaborations and points of friction between groups, including publicly engaged scholars, in the media democracy movement of the 1990s-2000s.