New Faculty: Jennifer Spohrer Considers
Media Revolutions, Then and Now

Her specialty is 20th-century European history, but Jennifer Spohrer could be called a Renaissance woman of the information age.

Her undergraduate honors thesis at the University of Texas at Austin was a play in prose and verse in the form of letters between characters in Hamlet. This fall, she completed the requirements for a Ph.D. at Columbia University when she successfully defended a dissertation about the interplay of international politics and radio, then an emerging technology, in the Europe of the 1930s.

In between those phases of her formal education, she made a name for herself writing about technology in a genre pretty far removed from historical scholarship. Instead of Charles deGaulle and John Reith, the characters in her narratives had names like Dark Mistress, Spider and Hellhound.

After graduating from college, Spohrer put her flair for words to work by writing and designing guidebooks and instruction manuals for computer games.

She and a few partners founded a successful business publishing books that explain in creative and amusing ways how computer games work.

"We had a blast designing some of the books," she says. "One of them introduced the game characters with their résumés. We had a great time coming up with the different kinds of paper and fonts they would choose and figuring out how 'the Dark Mistress' and 'the Hellhound,' for instance, would present themselves."

Eventually, Spohrer sold her shares in the business, and the proceeds of the sale helped fund her graduate education.

She had been an active participant in a technological revolution, and it is hardly surprising that she was drawn to the history of technology as a field of specialization.

For her dissertation, she examined an earlier technological revolution, the development of mass communication through radio.

She focused on the battle between the BBC, Britain's state-sponsored broadcasting monopoly, and the commercial Radio Luxembourg during the 1930s and '40s, a period that saw a wholesale change in Western European attitudes toward national broadcasting and freedom of information.

National rivalries and state control over communications media were prominent themes in this drama, Spohrer says.

Broadcast radio had evolved from developments in military communications technology during the First World War. After the treaty of Versailles was inked, military contractors sought civilian markets for their products.

In the United States, businesses quickly recognized the potential of the medium for advertising and began to sponsor hobbyists' broadcasts in exchange for air time. Though the practice of broadcast advertising was controversial at first, it had emerged as the primary method of funding radio programming by the time Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, Spohrer says.

According to Spohrer, the situation in Europe was entirely different: most European nations enacted laws forbidding radio advertising, and the trend was toward national public broadcasting monopolies.

"European countries are relatively small compared to the United States, and it's pretty easy to pick up broadcasts across national borders," she notes. "Governments really wanted to isolate their own national populations from, say, Radio Moscow, which was broadcasting socialist propaganda."

"It was generally accepted that the national governments should be able to control what their people listened to, so if they objected to something coming into their citizens' radios from another country, the other government should take it off the air."

The BBC had banned broadcast advertising, and Britain strenuously and repeatedly objected to Radio Luxembourg's advertisements and to the programming they supported, such as vaudeville-inspired variety shows in the American style.

That sort of content was as popular in Britain as it was in the United States, Spohrer says, but the BBC feared that Radio Luxembourg's lowbrow programming was undermining its project — elevating the minds of the British people with education, religion and culture broadcasts.

The International Broadcasting Union, later to become the European Broadcasting Union, provided a forum where Britain could air its complaints. The formation of such an organization, Spohrer says, was made necessary in Europe by technological concerns that did not affect the United States to the same degree.

"In the United States, the allocation of radio broadcast frequencies was done on a national level, and that worked because it's such a large country. But countries in Europe are small enough that two of them could assign the same frequency to broadcasters in overlapping areas and their signals would interfere with each other. So they had to coordinate just to divide up the broadcasting spectrum."

Between the World Wars, this cooperation led to the idea that broadcasting ought to respect national borders, a position held especially strongly by the BBC.

"But during the War, the BBC became the voice of many governments in exile; it provided a forum they could use to address their populations that were under occupation. This fostered the idea that there was an individual right to get news from outside, and it became very closely allied to the fight for democracy. By the time of the Cold War, Britain had become a very strong advocate of freedom of information across borders."

The effort by nations to control the flow of information across borders, of course, is hardly unique to the controversies over radio advertising in the 1930s. This fall, Spohrer is teaching a 300-level seminar that compares three media "revolutions": the printing press, radio and the Internet.

The Dark Mistress and the Hellhound undoubtedly had their avatars in each one.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 12/6/2007

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