Wireless telephone, materiality, and making of the national auditory in Turkey

Abstract

This paper focuses on the radio’s novelty years in 1920s Turkey to examine how the functions of wireless technology as a material artifact are negotiated in ways that fashion a national auditory. Most studies on radio’s history prioritize sound, eliding people’s tinkering with the wireless as a technical object. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, I suggest that early radio as a material object required as much of its listeners’ attention as did the broadcast content. In young Turkey’s war-torn economy, the only affordable way to listen to radio was learning how to assemble a receiver. Few owners of manufactured radios also learnt how to fix frequent problems. To form a passive national auditory, the state monitored the cultivation of these technical skills by banning transmitter-construction while encouraging assembling/fixing receivers. In addition to the body’s visceral/affective capacities, then, nation-states also discipline technical skills while forming a national auditory.