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Ok.. the new project is officially off the launch pad. Still a long way to go, but It's begun.
11 metres
Technology inevitably affects social change. From early cave drawings, the printing press, to the internet; our social behaviours reflect the technologies available to us. Perhaps the biggest changes are wrought by the technologies that enable free communication between peoples, which is why social media has had such far reaching and democratising influence over almost every nation on earth, and is instrumental in the notion of the “glocal” – the idea that globalism is reducing everyone, and everywhere to a common level of equality, and bringing about the problems swift social change always does.
35 years doesn’t seem that long ago to some of us, but it truly was a different age here in the UK. We had 3 television channels that closed down at night; home computers were still to arrive as consumer goods, and the telephone was a single use device connected by a cable and shared with the entire household. To communicate, even then, you wrote a letter, or made a telephone call to another tethered, stand-alone device and hope the recipient was “in” to take your call. Free, instant communication was still decades away.
Enter a phenomenon that most now have forgotten: CB Radio. Set against the backdrop of late 70s austerity, the ability to talk to anyone within a 20 mile radius, or if conditions allowed, anywhere in the world was clearly going to attract attention, and after the 1978 film Convoy, that’s precisely what happened.
The internet, instant digital worldwide communication and social media have all but killed the hobby however, and only 4x4 users and farmers use it these days. Even truckers, the very people who caused the national craze in the first instance rarely use it. However, there is a community of people for whom CB radio is very much alive and well, this work takes a look into how they have sustained the hobby and why they still use it today.
11 metres
Technology inevitably affects social change. From early cave drawings, the printing press, to the internet; our social behaviours reflect the technologies available to us. Perhaps the biggest changes are wrought by the technologies that enable free communication between peoples, which is why social media has had such far reaching and democratising influence over almost every nation on earth, and is instrumental in the notion of the “glocal” – the idea that globalism is reducing everyone, and everywhere to a common level of equality, and bringing about the problems swift social change always does.
35 years doesn’t seem that long ago to some of us, but it truly was a different age here in the UK. We had 3 television channels that closed down at night; home computers were still to arrive as consumer goods, and the telephone was a single use device connected by a cable and shared with the entire household. To communicate, even then, you wrote a letter, or made a telephone call to another tethered, stand-alone device and hope the recipient was “in” to take your call. Free, instant communication was still decades away.
Enter a phenomenon that most now have forgotten: CB Radio. Set against the backdrop of late 70s austerity, the ability to talk to anyone within a 20 mile radius, or if conditions allowed, anywhere in the world was clearly going to attract attention, and after the 1978 film Convoy, that’s precisely what happened.
The internet, instant digital worldwide communication and social media have all but killed the hobby however, and only 4x4 users and farmers use it these days. Even truckers, the very people who caused the national craze in the first instance rarely use it. However, there is a community of people for whom CB radio is very much alive and well, this work takes a look into how they have sustained the hobby and why they still use it today.
