WoW

No, not World of Warcraft. But War of the Worlds. I had never listened to the original broadcast but find that Radiolab's airing of certain clips of the broadcast, interlaced with questions regarding its modality and the actions it spurred, was much more beneficial to me. We talked a lot about in class how this probably couldn't happen now because you would have to have enough people watching/listening to the same thing at the same time which would be difficult with the thousands of options people have in their media intake. Not only would you have to get enough people to pay attention to your message for it to be effective, there are all sorts of FCC regulations, stations owned by corporations, and big cheese executives that would not let this happen.

I will tell you though that if I had a radio for under a year, as I would have in 1938; this mysterious box with words and music flowing from its speakers (but whose voices?) I would have definitely been one of the "1 in 12" statistic that went beserk--screaming and running to the streets. Think about it: with the radio being such a recent invention, the American public didn't know much about it: how radio frequencies work, who "DJs" the show, how the actual sounds are recorded so as to play them back at any given time. Add to this confusion, the idea that these "breaking news bulletins" had just come into effect a month before, and seemingly so often that "bulletins were interupting bulletins" (Radiolab). The tone of voice and the backgroudn noise are broadcast in such a way that it is designed to get the audience's attention and send them into a state of alert or panic. The way Orson Wells sounded to eerily similar to the commentator who had witnessed the Hindenburg tragedy (after he had reviewed the tape dozens of times) is a direct indicator of this.

So know you've got this box in front of me. I assume I've been getting truthful bulletins about Hitler and the Hindenburg and what have you. But you're telling me that you're going to deliberately, with the use of tone, rhetoric, outlets of media, strategic pausing and screaming, scare me so I run out of my house like a headless chicken, to tell me it's the radio's way of "jumping out of a bush with a white sheet and saying 'Boo!'" Not a funny joke. Not funny at all.

However, I can understand the point of the whole thing. The most significant portion of the Radiolab broadcast is the playing of Orson Wells many years later in the 1970's who explained that it was just a way to show people that anything the radio (or any media outlet for that matter) feeds us, we eat. And instead of digesting and regurgitating this information, he suggests we begin to ruminate (where cows chew, swallow, puke, chew, swallow, etc) and begin to think about the message and mull it over, considering its degree of modality.