Imagine a mannequin: On the top of her head she wears an antenna, a kind of cross, the account. It is the fantasy of the extension of men of the sort we find in early media theories. A Sender-Receiver for everybody, so that finally, against the strategic-ideological conditions of normalo ultra-high frequency, Brecht's call for the Kommunikationsapparat should be fulfilled (the dream-machine which we had long ago in the form of the telephone, 20 years before Marconi). Hence Radio is a metaphor, it occupies the utopia of telegenic freedom which reaches everyone. But this notion appears to be obsolete if we accept that the convergence of the media is being established by the big broadcasting companies. Sounds on demand are not very clever in this scenario and the slogan 'networking' can also be applied to the national grid. Rhizomatic structures alone can't create change. The 'other side', the subculture, if one could still define it in this way, plans new old things, namely a combination of DIY-culture, pirate radio stations, mailing and design. Their job is not committed to a so-called general public.

But if radio is no art, because it's technique derives from the war, but rather 'para-social communication' what is 'Radio' as a technology of the as-if?

Software allows broadcasting to emerge. The phrase Virtual Reality applies to the eroticism in the imagination of non/commercial as well as non/national use (see also Radio Internationale Stadt, page 3).

But the psychotronical power of sound, this "creeping into the brains of the masses" redoubles the compulsion to look at computer-aided media as expedients and tools. In fact they are more: factors of socialisation, but less too: transformational gears. When they 'play' (in 2 senses: games and theatre) radio in the net, the megaphone model of the counter-public is dead. May everybody hear anybody, but the emancipation from the listener changes into a New Aura of the value of goods thereby causing a market, where there will be a turnover of sounds, arguments, addresses. What's cool? A diversification into millions of voices, that will address everyone, producing threads which build centres, because a net is a net by means of its distances and knots. Loud providers will win, and some activists at the peripheries will develop their own centres. Form and strategy of net.radio are based in a traditionally revolutionary concept of opposition to the bourgeois mass media and its confirmation, as it is framed by the analysis of the underground, which creates the mainstream and vice versa. So we aren't looking for anti-media anymore, but for pro-media.

The head is located under the aerial. The big O, stands for Open Channel, the sand pit to learn media-competence, like the presidents - and concepts of the enemy - Bill Gates (USA), Roman Herzog (Germany) and Super Mario (Japan) call for. Half state-owned local channels prepare tele-democracy and drown in the patchwork of their programmes. But this idea is still part of the work in the collectives, who are labouring with the WWW; platforms offer and show space. But don't they also say, "This is where the music plays!" ? This is where it's at! They say it's dialectical, production vs. process (output and research) do not exclude each other like in the '68 debates.

However, open structures are dangerous things because of the inter-subjective censorship they need; a dynamic which challenges professionalism. You need the knowledge of the newest updates and upgrades. New algorithms for data-compression open the Post-FM-Era, but the RealAudiomachine is expensive, and in the mannequin the joy of switching between 0 and 1 is irrevocably built in, just like the strong arm of the telecommunications law.

In the mythology of electronic industry and information society the pressure to be autonomous ("to get a medium off the ground") is like a piece of the ancient Enlightenment. To open this machine means to break it off. This medium is not a toy!

Matze Schmidt [schwarze@hrz.uni-kassel.de]