How has eradio changed listener expectations in  comparison to traditional radio? 

 

“Radio had destroyed the world of his youth, …who cared  about  that now with radio coming in from everywhere?  …Radio gave so  much power to advertising and now  advertising was everything.  The businesses that poured money into radio got rich and the  ones that didn’t went nowhere…” 

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- Ray Soderbjerg, Radio Romance 

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Accounts of radio from the 1930’s eerily match criticism of  (anti)-  social media today. Interrupting, obscuring and  sidelining the  joys of daily life, radio can be said to have  triggered one of the  final detachments of humans from their  local environment. 

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Eradio, a turn of phrase first used in Berlin by the We Are Born  Free platform, maintains the magnetism to draw people together  in real life. Given the technical and organisational complexity of  delivering live content, we see temporary communities emerge   to transmit, witness and support eradio broadcasting. 

Despite  the definitionally remote nature of the medium eradio has  argueably begun to return some of the space occupied by  traditional broadcasting. Social and communal space that at one  time radio was charged with having taken away. In so doing it may  also continue to break the alienation fostered by the marriage of late capitalism and web based media.

In short, while no fixed physical studio yet exists for the  endeavours of the sub_ʇxǝʇ  platform, a number of sites have  shared in helping to get the message out there. From 199 at New River Studios, London, Adata Island in Bulgaria, d.i.y  church, Cashmere Radio or Theatre X in Berlin, Merapi volcano and the North Jakarta Sea Coast of  Indonesia, the Gütermarkt (flee market) and the Ständige  Vertretung at ZK/U - Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin.

Each one of these  events in collaboration  with Threads* has revealed the human joy in social participation and witnessing. 

The question remains however as to how well prepared such micro-  communities are in the face of enclosure. With the Soundcloud platform bending to the will of Universal Studios, and Mixcloud signalling its first restrictions on what has been a remarkably copyright-free/different environment, who can tell where online streaming is headed. 

With this in mind the sub_ʇxǝʇ platform can only continue in a scenario whereby structural threats and opportunities are central to its organisation. And in order to do this the platform must once again return to the nature of what it proposes collaboratively. 

  

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