ABSTRACT
When the Titanic hit its iceberg, Version 1.0 of radio went down with the ship. As sociologist Eszter Hargittai argues, radio turned out to be implicated in the disaster in ways that poisoned popular opinion against an unregulated, open system. A nearby ship could have saved passengers, for example, but its radio wasn't switched on. Worse, the babel of messages from amateurs produced conflicting news about whether or not the ship was safe. The resulting mood in the public and the press made it easy for the US government to regulate the airwaves. Once in place, this regulation enabled the development of commercial broadcast networks, which changed radio from point-to-point to broadcast technology. 1
