ABSTRACT
With some important exceptions like the telephone and still photography, mass media since their beginnings have been overwhelmingly organized in such a way that the “mass” of people (i.e., us) participate mainly as receptors and hardly ever as transmitters. And since the beginning, it has been recognized that this organization is not a technological necessity, but a political and social development. Bertolt Brecht recognized this fact in the 1920s when he wrote his essay “Theory of Radio.” There Brecht remarked:
Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio could be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked system — that is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact. Unrealizable in this social system, realizable in another, these proposals, which are, after all, only the natural consequences of technical development, help towards the propagation and shaping of that other system.
