This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.

Just a century separates the practical origins of radio transmission in 1895 and the first smartphone in 1997: a century which saw the rapid extensions of experimentation into widespread applications. The wireless revolution would transform almost every aspect of human interaction and society, from finance and business to political propaganda and the control of crime. Communication ceased to be a matter of space, and wireless communication was a revolution with as important transformative impact as any in history.

Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

This chapter explores the development of youth music media and music festivals in Australia, and the synergies between them. This includes the national expansion in the 1990s of public youth radio station Triple J, and its ABC television counterparts rage and Recovery, in parallel with a new wave of music festivals like the Big Day Out, Homebake and Livid. This infrastructure and these events were central to a period of transition for Australian popular music. Local alternative scenes developed into a translocal industrial sub-sector, marketing a distinct national identity and incorporating urban and regional youth audiences. Cultural institutions and practices established during this time, such as the modern music festival and the celebration of ‘homegrown’ Australian artists, continue to be influential. This chapter draws on secondary texts and scholarly literature to map and connect these developments, which are analysed using scene theory.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

Chapter Twelve explores three endeavors embraced by Rogers in the last decade of his life. His wanderlust and populist desire to gain practical knowledge and meet ordinary people prompted extensive world travel that took him to Central and South America, Europe, China, Japan, and the Soviet Union. These encounters bolstered his staunch anti-imperialism. Rogers also emerged as one of America’s greatest boosters of aviation. Seeing the wide-open skies as a new frontier and airplane pilots as updated version of the self-reliant cowboy, he promoted the development of commercial and military aviation at every opportunity and idolized flyers such as Lindbergh. Finally, Rogers embraced the newfangled media technology of radio. He became the host of a nationally broadcast radio program, first for CBand then for NBC, that allowed him to reach an enormous audience with his humorous reflections on the issues and personalities of the day. Rogers also became entangled in controversy when he used the n-word in one of his broadcasts, undercutting his record of supporting African Americans while forcing him to confront his own casual assumption of white racial superiority.

This chapter argues that building strong institutions and a productive economy in the aftermath of conflict is not enough and that rebuilding lost social capital and trust is of paramount importance. Intergroup trust matters deeply, as the same formal institutions can have divergent effects in different social structures and for different levels of social capital. Starting from the so-called contact hypothesis that fostering positive intergroup interaction builds trust, it is argued that reconciliation and the rebuilding of social trust are also part of the promising blend of propeace policies. A variety of empirical studies are discussed, ranging from reconciliation efforts in Rwanda and Sierra Leone to programs fostering intergroup contacts in Spain, Nigeria, India and Iraq. While we find that more intense group contacts deploy typically desirable effects, trying to achieve reconciliation by altering beliefs through media campaigns is a double-edged sword that involves a series of dangers. We conclude this chapter by stressing the key role of stepping up critical thinking.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

The chapter examines Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It focusses on the policy pressures and dynamics shaping BBC music broadcasting, and interrelationships between those and the creation, promotion, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Vaughan Williams’s music, reflecting on the ways in which a range of public and quasi-public bodies dedicated to the production and promotion of ‘national’ culture created a distinct political dynamic to the ‘field of cultural production’ in Britain in the period from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 through the interwar, war, and postwar years. It argues that this context and relationship is foundational for understanding his work, style, and reception, and invites (re)consideration of the role of authorial agency and authorial voice in reception history.

In the struggle to sustain the nation’s economy and society accompanying World War One, the concept of ‘applied science’ was widely deployed and further enriched. It gained new traction through wartime and post-war administrative developments and the debates over research amongst the military services, civilian agencies, and private industry. Generic issues of the time were highlighted by the 1917 Sothern Holland enquiry into the organisation of naval research. Subsequently, new establishments, such as the DSIR and the Committee of Civil Research, shaped applied science. The chapter shows the interpretation of applied science by individual institutions and the press by exploring the details of specific research projects in the military, the radio industry and, above all, coal-oil manufacture. Thus it treats research on converting coal to oil at ICI, the Low Temperature Carbonisation Company, and Powell Duffryn. Through their thinking over funding priorities, new bodies often formulated and promoted their own conceptions of applied science. They both responded to public opinion and helped shape widely shared understanding.

This chapter assembles information about the UK’s supply of news in order to estimate the amount and variety of news available. Though information is sometimes limited or absent, it maps out the number and the nature of TV, radio, print and online news sources to provide an account of the news landscape. It then examines the content and quality of the news sources available, comparing commercial and public service news and misunderstandings about their bias. The importance of internal pluralism is discussed.

The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).

Chapter 1 expands on the Introduction’s brief exploration of Norbert Wiener’s theories alongside modernist literary aesthetics to argue that Ezra Pound’s Cantos and radio broadcasts employ the logic of cybernetic feedback as a pedagogical model for teaching twentieth-century readers how to negotiate large quantities of data, find meaningful patterns within messages from the past, and adapt their conduct to best achieve their goals. Elucidating arguments that Pound makes in his radio broadcasts and poetry (particularly the Chinese History Cantos) and comparing them to Wiener’s mid-century theories of cybernetic feedback, Love challenges the critical tendency to compare Pound’s work to unidirectional radio transmission. Instead, the chapter’s analyses illustrate that Pound champions the principle of circulation and positions his readers as cybernetic machines, inviting them to learn from the feedback loops that circulate throughout history, culture, and language.

Chapter 3 draws on 1950s and 1960s cybernetics-inflected psychology, represented by W. Ross Ashby and Silvan Tomkins. Love examines the theory of language Virginia Woolf employs in The Waves (1931) and more explicitly presents in a 1937 radio talk, contextualizing Woolf’s emphasis on gaps in perception and suggestive linguistic potential in terms of Ashby’s cybernetic “black-box” thought experiment and Tomkins’s cybernetics-based theories of affect. This work illuminates Woolf’s strategy of highlighting the variety of affective responses that specific scenarios can produce for different subjects, even within the most intimate communities. The comparison shows how Woolf’s aesthetic model, through its invocation of radio’s built-in black-box aesthetic of “blindness,” teaches readers about the way cybernetic thinking inflects social and interpersonal contexts: as we attempt to interact with and relate to one another, we must rely on perceptions that are incomplete, partial, and individually inflected. By drawing audiences’ attention to this aspect of our social world, Woolf makes cybernetic thinking affectively motivated and relevant at the level of personal interaction.

This chapter considers Puccini’s interest in technology of various types. It examines, first, his passion for speed, encapsulated in an early enthusiasm for motoring. The author discusses the models of car owned by Puccini as well as his various motorboats. Puccini’s enthusiasm for hunting is discussed from a technological perspective. The chapter considers how technology even had an impact upon Puccini’s compositional output, discussing various attempts the composer made to harness electricity for musical purposes, even attempting to invent new instruments to make particular sonic effects. The gramophone played a vital role in disseminating Puccini’s works, though his enthusiasm for the medium of recording was tempered by the difficulties he experienced in recouping royalties. Finally, embryonic radio technology was a source of fascination to the composer.

Radio historians observe that Midwestern accents defined the sonic norms of broadcast speech in the United States, and that “BBC English” became a “supra-local accent” that transformed the speech patterns of a small group into an imperial standard. Does literary modernism follow the same model? This chapter takes up the theoretical writings around “broadcast modernism” to write a regionalist theory of poetic modernism in the US. I read backwards from Lorine Niedecker’s desire for “speech without practical locale,” to bring together Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot as Midwestern modernists whose compositions on, about, and for the radio produced work on speech that tune us into regional differences against the modernist ideology of radio’s “voice from nowhere”: the ambition of acoustic engineering, corporate infrastructure, and presidential speech. Anticipating the myth of the “neutral” Midwestern media voice, these poets’ work reveals the provincialism in modernism’s cosmopolitan desires.