The Department of American Culture and Literature is pleased to announce an upcoming talk by Dr. Andy Kelleher Stuhl entitled “The Automation Bias: Radio Art and American Technopolitics.” Refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you there.
Date: Tuesday, 4 March
Time: 17:30 to 19:00
Location: G-140
Abstract:
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new technology—radio automation—was changing how sound and information flowed among American audiences, musicians, and creative intermediaries like disc jockeys. But automation did not take hold automatically in American media; a complex set of cultural and technological actors negotiated its installation into radio and thereby into sonic culture. This talk traces how managers, engineers, radio workers, and experimental sound artists variously responded to a pivotal moment in media computerization—and draws out the implications of radio automation’s victory for understanding American culture and technology today.
Media theory has often understood distance and time as the quantities that media intend to overcome; labor also belongs in this set of “biases” (in Harold Innis’s sense) against which media and their social contexts orient. A postwar American bias toward automation helped determine radio’s path in a period of dramatic reconfiguration for broadcast media. Today, a new phase of that bias sees media firms proposing more automation, as when platform executives promise to improve moderation through AI, as the salve for automation’s harms. By understanding automation as a persistent, inherent, and active function of media, as the historical examples from American radio require, we can better apprize media’s cultural tendencies under managerial capitalism.
Bio:
Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a historian of American media technology and sonic culture. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and teaches in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University. His current project, Unmaking a Medium, traces sixty years of industrial and artistic reckonings with automation in American broadcast radio. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Media and Society, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.