ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1896 a young Irish-Italian Guglielmo Marconi first succeeded, in a demonstration on Salisbury Plain, in making a wireless wave travel beyond the horizon. Certain social, cultural, educational and political dilemmas had been apparent in mass society for a generation. The working class had produced its own writers who had enjoyed, like Cobbett, overwhelming success in their relationship with a vast working-class readership. The argument between the alarmists and the anti-alarmists was fundamentally an argument about the nature of communication with the newly enfranchised. There are two riddles coiled at the roots of radio and television broadcasting; in one sense they run through all political discussion since the age of print began, but in broadcasting they have become inseparable, a double conundrum with a hundred answers, all of them unsatisfactory.
