This article is from WeChat official account:Single reading (ID: dandureading)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: Liu Ning (writer, translator), author of the original title: “my 2020: from the graceful radio, to free podcasts,” head Figure from: vision China
Speaking of the important changes that took place last year, the podcast blowout is undoubtedly one of them. During the lockdown of the epidemic, Liu Ning lived a real “(sitting) life. He judged that the world will undergo several major changes after the epidemic. Among them, he is most concerned about “cultural evolution”. In the vigorous post-modern cultural production, podcasts are the most dynamic one.
As a senior user who listens to podcasts on the same day, Liu Ning analyzed the reasons for the popularity of podcasts and traced the development of broadcasting. In the end, he gave his observations on the current ecology of local podcasting. Although it is in its infancy, there are many shortcomings, but the degree of freedom of podcasting will make it an important medium to draw the public opinion field.
one
2020 is destined to be a cursed year and a year to be remembered, not just because of the Gengzi Year.
At 2 am on January 23, Wuhan was closed down; three days later, Hubei closed down the province. Immediately after that, in less than a week, the entire country’s urban and rural areas entered a closed or quasi-closed state. In the middle of the night on February 5th, the author returned to the snow-covered imperial capital from Tokyo, and was thrown into the ocean of anti-epidemic fight by the whole people. Since then, I have lived a real “work(Sit) “Home” life: enter and exit the community with a pass, go to the supermarket twice a week, and express it to a designated area outside the community to pick up.
On the night of March 12th, thinking of the endless days of this dull and boring day, anxiety struck for a while, and even insomnia, so I wrote an article “A Different World After the Epidemic”. In the article, I weakly make four judgments:
1. The world economy is in recession;
2. Strengthening the nation-state;
3.Globalization is back;
4. The evolution of culture.
The reason why I am “weak” is that I don’t want to be a wizard, and I don’t speak like a slogan, even though I am quite sure in my heart. But that article encountered the most stringent “passing sieve” in the history of personal account writing: starting at 6:30 in the morning, I tried no less than 20 times, changed countless keywords, and used asterisks, slashes, and small horizontal lines. All kinds of symbols have not been issued. As a last resort, I had to urgently seek help from the editor friends of Eastern History Review. After proofreading carefully, my friend did a few more treatments, and it was sent out smoothly—it was almost noon. I feel painful that media writing and new media writing are really not a concept, and I cannot accept it.
Back to the topic. Among the above four judgments, my personal concern is actually the fourth point, “cultural evolution.” I wrote:
The epidemic is like a folding fan with Wuhan as its axis, and the fan bones are radiating lines. As far as radiation is reached, culture is changing, and the direction of change is post-modernization.
Yes, “post-modernization” is the key. The epidemic has accelerated the development of post-modernism.
Later, as everyone who has lived through the devastating year of 2020 can see, the world takes countries as a unit, and there are no exceptions. Most countries even go down for three or four rounds. From East Asia to Europe, North America, and Australia, major cities in the world’s major developed and sub-developed countries all locked down within one to two months, so that shops were closed, white-collar workers worked at home, and students switched to online classes. As far as the result is concerned, it is equivalent to the mass production of hundreds of millions of otaku and otaku in a short period of time worldwide, and they are basically “dead otaku”(Hikikomori , Also known as “Hanging Clan”).
These people who were forced to live in their homes from work and school are different from the pre-epidemic otaku (Otaku). Most of them live in large and medium-sized cities. , Have independent economic ability and strong social ability, benefit from the perfect network environment, and the connection with the real society has never been interrupted. For them, although it is forced to stay at home, it is truly online 24 hours a day, which saves access to work. Once a person leaves the workplace, even if there is a binding of performance indicators, he will not consciously practice 996.
Most of them, after the initial adaptation period, will adjust their rhythms, complete their sub-tasks in a short time, and spend most of their time studying, socializing, exercising, and resting. There are also some people who spend their spare time in production. In addition to literary creations such as poetry and novels, academic research, translation, and text published on printed media, the content produced includes a large number of animations, games, and videos released through social media platforms such as YouTube, Douyin, and Station B, and then This is a typical postmodern production.
Thanks to the well-developed Internet economy, in the past year, although these post-modern content creators stayed at home, there are bamboo food and fish behind closed doors. “An adequate society for the readers”(Japanese postmodern philosopher Tohiro Jiyu), facing the computer screen all day long, sometimes operating the mobile phone , The days are actually tense and busy. The content produced should also be massive. I am not an animation control, nor do I understand video games and board games, nor do I have specific data in the industry. However, as far as the areas of personal concern are concerned, 2020 is also a year of post-modern cultural blowout. Among them, the most dynamic ones are not Podcasts are none other than.
two
Podcast(Podcast) is not a new thing. It appeared as early as the beginning of this century. Around 2005, it was integrated into the Apple system by Jobs and became an App(Podcasts). Technically speaking, because podcasts are only an mp3 file, the threshold is low, and it is easy to crawl and push through RSS. Therefore, with the mobile Internet The development of Internet radio stations in the pre-podcast era has basically replaced the Internet radio stations in the short term.
However, Since its launch, podcasts have been tepid and maintained the “Buddha” development. This seems to be related to Apple’s positioning of podcasts, and it is said that podcasts themselves have not been able to establish profitability. Mode related. The biggest development opportunity in podcasting history is in 2020, and the opportunity is nothing else, it is the global spread of the new crown. I have been listening to podcasts for several years, but day after day, consciously following certain specific podcasts will be after the Spring Festival in 2020, which is related to the podcast platform “Small Universe”.
Small Universe went live at the end of March. I should have become a user of it within a month or so, and I have become more and more powdered, and the time spent on it every day has been increasing. It is said that as of the end of 2020, only one platform of the small universe has gathered tens of thousands of podcasts, most of which appeared in 2020. Therefore, we can say that 2020 is the “Podcast Year”.
So, here comes the question: why not 2019, not 2021, but 2020? Of course, it has something to do with the epidemic and its long-term development. Lockdowns, isolation, forced social distancing, code scanning, remote office, online classes, Tencent meetings… all these new ways of life and production are all in order to create and strengthen people. The orientation of alienation between people and society and the world has further aggravated the already strong social anxiety and led to widespread depression. “Involution” and “mourning” have become the key words of post-epidemic culture. People are eager to “seeking comfort” and seeking all possible connections online. Coupled with the low threshold, low cost, and strong practicality of podcasting itself, it will lead to 2020, podcasting like “post-epidemic” The scenery of the times that springs up like bamboo shoots.
It stands to reason that the same socio-psychological background should theoretically bring about a big increase in videos, manga, animation, and games, but the result did not appear. This aspect is related to the characteristics of the above-mentioned podcasting industry, in addition to some in-depth characteristics of podcasting culture. In contrast, no matter video, comics, animation, or games, all involve production, editing, distribution, and marketing.Relying on a certain scale of industry intensification, and relying solely on the efforts of individuals or fellow creative teams, is beyond reach and is extremely difficult to achieve-this is also the main reason why the podcast industry looks “uniquely beautiful” during the epidemic period.
three
Why do people follow podcasts?
Before explaining this issue, it’s best to let us re-understand what a podcast is. According to the knowledge archeology of Yang Yi, a well-known Chinese broadcaster, on February 4, 2004, a column in the British “Guardian” used the term “Podcast” for the first time, referring specifically to the period when Apple iPod users learned from iTunes. Import some audio files into iPod for easy listening at any time. And “Podcast” should be a compound word of iPod and Broadcast.
As for the academic, physical and chemical definition of podcasting, I don’t know. But I humbly thought that there is no need to dig into the definition. In my opinion, podcasting is a form of digital broadcasting, but it is different from Internet radio and audiobooks-compared to the latter, it is an advanced technology. For example, a podcast is like a dry battery with energy storage. It is a “capsule” full of sound that can be played in a round-the-clock loop through the mobile client. That’s all. There is no doubt that podcasting is a sound medium, but it is different from a telephone and a tape recorder.
I recently listened to a podcast and said “The medium of sound is the closest to the human soul.” If you just listen to this sentence, it is more or less the industry’s hard-to-reach. However, if we borrow the terminology from the communication industry, it is indeed a fact to say that people’s voices are very “sticky”. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain the fascination with a certain announcer on a radio station, from a female exchange operator who speaks good Mandarin, to a certain voice actor in a dubbed film, before the digital age.
In this regard, Marshall McLuhan’s explanation is: “Compared with neutral eyes, ears are very sensitive. Ears are not forgiving. They are closed,Excluding, the eyes are open, neutral, and full of associations. “This is an explanation based on the characteristics of the media acting on hearing.
In addition, based on my experience of chasing podcasts in the past two years, I can also analyze the cultural attributes of podcasts from five levels. Some of these attributes are derived from the medium of the predecessor of podcasting—radio, which belongs to “ancient things”, but it has been reinforced in the era of podcasting. Therefore, talking about the attributes of podcasts is inseparable from the radio.
——Magic sense. Recently, a retro-style Bluetooth Internet radio called Magic Box has been released, which is quite popular among petty bourgeoisie. “Magic Box” is actually a nickname for radio in the early days. It is reminiscent of Pandora’s Box, and it is also a bit like the “chatbox” of the northern Chinese dialect. When the radio was invented, it was considered a magical medium. American sociologist Leonard Dub, in his research report “Communication in Africa” (Communication in Africa), talked about a Indigenous African:
Although he couldn’t understand a word, this man tried his best to listen to the BBC news every night. It is vital for him to hear those sounds on time at seven o’clock every night. His attitude towards speech is just like our attitude towards melody—the sonorous tone is very interesting in itself.
In this regard, McLuhan’s explanation is that “the radio’s depth is full of the resounding echoes of tribal horns and distant drums”, which is actually “the characteristics of the broadcasting medium itself”:< /p>
The radio affects most people directly and face-to-face, providing a world in which the author or speaker and the audience communicate without words.
And this is where the magic of the radio lies.
——Intimacy. Radio and podcasts are both media for the ears. Compared with the open, neutral, and associative eyes, the ear is sensitive, it is not forgiving, it is closed and exclusive. An important part of foreign language learning is to practice listening, because the ear has memory. And the memory must be exclusive, it is only one scoop of three thousand weak waters. My friend and postmodern theorist Wang Minan said:
The dislocation, drop, and dissonance of the ear and the sound is one of the starting points of the radio. The whole mission of the radio is to find the right sound for the ear. The ear that does not listen has no meaning; the sound that is not heard has no meaning. But it is usually the case that the ear and the sound it is willing to listen to are usually missed. In this sense, the radio just solves this contradiction. It seeks sounds for its ears…until the appropriate sound resides in its ears.
It is a wonderful thing for people to find and solidify a sound without sight or touch, but only by hearing. In today’s highly developed mobile Internet technology, even if the cost of audio phone and video phone are exactly the same, they are technically one-touch, but most people still choose audio, even if it is talking with their lovers. Why do people listen to the radio, chase podcasts, chase for hours, even hours? Regardless of the content conveyed by the broadcast, the first thing that attracts us is the sound itself.
According to McLuhan’s academic expression, it is called “the medium is the message”, and in current media terms, it is “the stickiness of the voice.” The so-called “stickiness” used to be called “magnetism”. To put it bluntly, it is the quality of the sound, a certain element that can be absorbed by it. Just as the old man Yi was “poisoned” to the babbling female voice, adult women will also be captured by the deep and thick baritone. Teacher Zhao Zhongxiang’s classic dubbing in “Animal World” “The rainy season is over, it’s here again.” The mating season” attracts more than just children.
In English, “Personality” means personality, temperament, and charm, and it also refers to those famous mouthpieces and gold medal hosts in TV broadcasts. In Japanese, the loanword “パーソナリティ“, which is derived from this word, refers specifically to the intersection with those abstract nouns in English The host who broadcasts late at night, or the host of a podcast. I humbly believe that the semantics of this word in English and Japanese is not accidental. The unique temperament of the anchor is reflected in the personality of the voice. And a “sticky” voice, in addition to better conveying the content of the broadcast, it will also convey a sense of intimacy to the listeners.
The difference from TV and movies is that Although broadcasting is also a medium for all listeners, it often gives listeners the illusion that they are only broadcasting for themselves. This kind of intimate “illusion” is not limited to the “one-to-one” time of connecting with the audience in the program, or reading the audience’s letters, but will spread to the entire duration of the program. For example, I often listen to a Japanese culture podcast, and once called to investigate what kind of podcast the podcast audience liked and why. An old man from Shinagawa district in Tokyo is very frank, saying that he must chase a late-night podcast every day. The female anchor’s smoky voice is very much like the charming mother San in the Ginza bar where he used to soak, “Listen to her Even the mantra makes people think that this is my woman.”
If the father’s “illusion” represents the general psychology of the audience, this intimacy atmosphere is actually a deliberate brewing of the content maker. Borrowing podcast terms, it is the result of the “empathy” between the supply and demand sides. : Those who follow the heart will find that, unlike the radio era, nowadays Chinese podcasts often refer to listeners as “listeners”, and rarely “listeners”. The difference between one word is that the “temperature difference” is not small: your daily follower is not the eloquent announcer on the Central People’s Broadcasting Station, but the female anchor of Fan’er, the girl next door in the mobile Internet era.
——A sense of companionship. Accompanying is a seemingly common thing, but when I think about it, it’s a great thing. In real life, there are cats and cats who can take on this practical function. (However, it is not so much the “empathy” of cats and dogs, but rather It’s the master’s “empathy”-not arguing), but the media (or tools) are very few. It should be said that the radio has realized this function very early, and that is also our childhood life experience:
The radio has an invisible shell, which is the same as any other medium. It appears in front of us in a private and intimate form of direct interaction between people. However, it is actually a subconscious resonance box that has magical power and can pull long forgotten strings. This is the fact that matters.
Here, McLuhan obviously still focuses on the media attributes of radio, and believes that “radio has the power to turn the mind and society into a resonance box that merges into one.” In the era of podcasting, although the resonance box is still the same, it has some more social media elements, and the companionship function is further strengthened.
Experience shows that when people are engaged in some monotonous and repetitive tasks(such as commuting, fitness, running, housework, etc.), except for a few cases, most people don’t really enjoy it, so real-time companionship is needed for the purpose of distraction ——Forget about the boringness in front of you for the time being. Music has this function to some extent, but it is still weaker, and can only serve as a background at best. And broadcasting, from the broadcaster’s voice to the broadcast content, “stickiness” “Large, strong sense of substitution, can make people forget time, is an excellent company.
In the 1970s, when Japanese housewives were doing housework, they listened to radio dramas by the female writer Kuniko Xiangtian. I still remember that when I was a child, I was doing my homework and listening to the simulcast of long storytelling on the radio. The German playwright Brecht once wrote a poem that vividly expresses his dependence on the companion radio:
Little box, I will flee with you in my arms,
I just don’t want to smash your vacuum tube.
Escape to the ship, escape to the train,
Be able to hear the enemy’s yells too.
On the head of the bed, what hurts my heart is
The cry of the enemy.
Before going to bed, when I woke up, I heard
The victory of the enemy is a sad thing.
Xiaozi, you promised,
Don’t, suddenly silent.
——Deep connection. Modern urban people often feel lonely. Once loneliness strikes, there will be no bounds and no decline. Moreover, as a problem originating from modernity itself, there is basically no way to change it. Simmel reveals the reality that the city is a factory for loneliness in the form of straight talk, “People can’t feel the isolation and loss that people feel in the metropolis anywhere”.
In the age of social media, there were originally “superficial, indifferent and short-lived urban social relations”(Louis Voss) becomes more fragmented. People are used to using no more than one hundred and forty words to condense their own Feelings of happiness, anger, sorrow and life, and in most cases, only a few words or even an emoji are used to express the meaning. So, in fact, how hilarious people are on social media, and how lonely they are in their hearts, this is almost a question of two sides.
In the early 1980s, even in places like Silicon Valley in the United States, the information society had just begun to take shape. John Nesbitt, known as the “futurist” at the time, was full of expectations for the future, but he was not without worries: “We are submerged by the ocean of information, but we are hungry for knowledge.” Today, the information society has entered the 2.0 era. People have been acquainted with the “knowledge explosion” for a long time, and they have become accustomed to it. The “knowledge” that is everywhere on the Internet, if it is not built-in traffic, rarely attracts attention. But compared to knowledge, what everyone really desires is connection: celebrities are eager to connect with the audience, writers are eager to connect with readers, parents are eager to connect with their children, and LGBTQ are eager to connect with those who understand him(her) people.
In the era of social media, connection itself is not difficult. For a person who is eager to connect, one can think of a like as a connection. But the problem is that too many connections are “shallow contact” (Shallow Contact), except for temporarily satisfying the hunger for “comfort” Thirst, it’s actually difficult for people to get real comfort from it, let alone being cured-Just like an emoji’s “hug”, it’s impossible to bring you physical and warm intimacy.
In contrast, broadcasting (especially podcasts) relies on “sticky” sound and “vertical” content to establish a connection. A deep connection with a strong sense of substitution. To borrow McLuhan’s theoretical discourse, “sound space is organic and indivisible, and it is a space that is felt through the simultaneous interaction of various sense organs.” This interactivity of the sound medium is a conclusion that was confirmed before the war: “When I listen to the radio, I live directly on the radio” “Listening to the radio is far easier to enter the state of ecstasy than reading a book.” Field data such as these are uncommon in media sociology research texts in Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan.
I was in Japan in my early yearsAt work, I caught up with a business trip and couldn’t go back to Tokyo. On weekends, I wandered around in a small city in the northern Kanto region. At that time, there were no convenience stores, but around Ojo Station, there were many small shops, bookstores, grocery stores, cafes, post offices, hairdressers, izakayas… everything, like a small Ginza.
In my memory, I used to make bookstores and coffees. The old shopkeeper always turned on the radio, like a background sound, the volume was low, but he heard it really. Most of them are talk shows, one man and one woman, with a wide range of topics, and sometimes phone calls with listeners. The voices of the two anchors are so good that they are “sticky” voices, so many years later, the content of the conversation is basically forgotten, but the voices of the anchors are like engraved on the eardrums, and I want to forget it. Can not forget. Until later, I used my own SONY radio to lock the bands and frequencies of those anchors one by one, and then I became a listener of those broadcasts.
Hitachi Station in Ibaraki Prefecture in Kita Kanto, Japan
Similar experiences did not gradually get until I returned to Beijing in the late 1990s. When I took a taxi home late at night, the taxi driver’s car radio often played FM radio. I was forced to use it. In addition to music programs such as “Easy FM” that I often listen to, there are also some talk and emotional programs. . There are a few male and female anchors with very magnetic voices. They interact with listeners by chatting with friends. They are not deliberately sensational, but they are better than sensational.
At that time, the society was undergoing further transformation, and the gap between the rich and the poor was rapidly widening. I felt that the streets were filled with depressed people, especially my brother. After going back and forth, unconsciously, I was involved in the kind of “deep connection” conveyor belt woven by sound and content. Since then, I have only noticed that the local broadcasters are no longer all news announcers from Yangguang and Beiguang. The male and female anchors in late-night FM are not our “Personality”.
——degree of freedom. Because they belong to the same sound medium, when people talk about the characteristics of podcasts, they sometimes “confuse it with the broadcasting of the radio age”.”But that is, after all, a cultural product of two eras. Because of the one-way nature of human hearing, broadcasting is also a medium of “free” while conveying intimacy. Of course, this freedom is not only expressed on the scale of content. Sometimes it appeals to people’s imagination. For example, in the era of radio dramas, producers will use various props to simulate storms, robberies, and even gunfights. In the modern AV industry, there are also many ways to simulate sound. (Let the audience)Brain replenishment and strengthen visual effects.
As far as podcasting is concerned, unlike broadcasting in the radio era, the content is no longer limited by band resources. The program can be long or short, “stored” in the mobile phone, and can be played at any time. At least in terms of format, the capacity that can be carried by long podcasts is no longer comparable to broadcasting in the radio era. I have even listened to 290 minutes of Japanese podcasts. As far as the degree of freedom of the content itself is concerned, due to the linear fluidity of the sound medium, if people do not hear from the beginning to the end, they will miss some content, perhaps even the most important content. Unlike a text or video file, you only need to drag the progress bar back and forth to get a general grasp of the content.
For a 120-minute podcast, if the prompts in Show Notes are not enough, the entire content is actually difficult to retrieve; theoretically, it should also be difficult to censor. Perhaps this is the guarantee of the “degree of freedom” of its content scale. As for whether the podcast anchor will use this “degree of freedom”, or even risk being banned, for “bad use”, it is another question. But objectively speaking, under the so-called “standardization of writing” of Chinese media and publications, the female anchors who returned from overseas have a large number of Chinese and English mashups. Two young girls with very sticky voices chat. Serious topics, sometimes light-hearted narratives, are really impossible to present in any form of text outside of podcasts.
“Screws are tightening” Issue 000 Show Notes
For another example, I haveIn the Chinese podcast, I have heard the stories of girls who provide adult audio services on Taobao, and heard that Beijing students who studied in the United States used the summer vacation to return to Beijing, “to be idle is also to be idle”, by the way, rent an apartment, hire two foreign girls, and direct A story released for the European and American markets. As for the drug-taking experience in Amsterdam, long-term interviews with the most popular Chinese female stars on the P station, etc., these are really quite “daily” podcast topics. All of this actually means the “degree of freedom” of the content, which sometimes constitutes the element of intimacy conveyed by the medium of podcasting.
Speaking of it, magic, intimacy, companionship, deep connection, freedom-The five attributes of podcasting are interlocking and progressive relationships, like old ones The “five sins” that the poisonous insects instigate the amateurs, starting from the first puff, each time he changes the “tips” with different tastes and different intensities, making him fall into it step by step and unable to extricate himself while he is hallucinating: a sense of magic Responsible for arousing people’s curiosity; intimacy makes people pass the curiosity stage, but still reluctant to leave; companionship is based on intimacy, without intimacy, how to talk about companionship; deep connection is the result of companionship; and freedom is companionship Value and return. Otherwise, companionship becomes a bondage, or even a shackle.
four
Podcasting has been quickly accepted, and there is an obvious but often overlooked background: Podcasting is an extension of radio culture. I heard a podcast a few days ago, and I realized that 2020 is exactly the 100th anniversary of the birth of commercial broadcasting: In 1920, Westinghouse applied for the first commercial broadcasting license in the United States and opened it in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. KDKA radio station.
If it is not limited to commercial radio stations with official licenses, the history of broadcasting can go further for fifteen years: On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1906, Regina, a Canadian electrical engineer who had worked as Edison’s assistant De Fessenden(Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, 1866-1932), read aloud the part of the “Bible” about the coming of Jesus, and played his violin , Sang a hymn “Holy Night” (O Holy Night). The sound is then converted into radio wave signals and transmitted through a 128-meter-high transmission tower erected in the town of Brant Rock, Massachusetts.
In advance, Fessendan published an advertisement in the newspaper, announcingTelegraphers of newspapers and merchant ships sailing in the Pacific. It was confirmed afterwards that the telegraphers really listened to the radio. A week later, on New Year’s Eve, December 31, Fessenden made a replay. This was the beginning of human radio broadcasting, and Fessenden was called the “father of radio broadcasting” ten years after Marconi invented radio.
As soon as the media of radio broadcasting appeared, the speed of its information dissemination was favored by people. After a short period of profit-making mode exploration, it has made great progress in the United States.(This is similar to podcasts a hundred years later), from the increase in advertising revenue in the broadcasting industry, it can be seen: 4 million US dollars in 1924, 10.5 million US dollars in 1928, Before the “Great Panic” in 1929, it had reached 40 million U.S. dollars. In 1926, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) was established. The following year, another national broadcasting company, CBS (CBS) was established, and the entertainment characteristics of radio broadcasting were further highlighted.
In 1928, the sales of radios in the United States reached 750 million U.S. dollars, and the usage reached 8 million. The radio waves covered urban and rural areas across the country and became the “nervous system of the consumer society.” With the popularization of automobiles, car radios also began to be popularized. By 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, 80% of households owned radios. Radio advertisements are extremely influential. Presidential candidates buy prime-time advertisements and deliver “sounds of meat” speeches on the radio, which are optional actions.
Following the United States, the Soviet Union Radio Moscow, French State Radio, German Broadcasting Corporation (RRG), British Broadcasting CorporationThe company’s (BBC) and other radio stations started broadcasting successively. In terms of time alone, the start of China’s broadcasting industry is not too late. At the end of 1922, the American Osborn (E. G. Osborn) established a radio company in Shanghai, mainly engaged in broadcasting equipment. At the same time, in cooperation with the Shanghai “Mainland News”, the first radio station in the mainland was opened, which started broadcasting on January 23, 1923. In October 1926, the Harbin Radio Station, founded by the Feng Faction warlord, started broadcasting. In March of the following year, Shanghai Xinxin Company Broadcasting Station started broadcasting, which was the first private radio station. On May 1, 1927, the Ministry of Communications of the Kuomintang established the first public radio station in Tianjin. On August 1, 1928, the “Central Radio Station” of the Kuomintang began broadcasting. So far, China has a national radio station.
Japan’s first radio station started broadcasting two years later than China: March 1, 1925, from the Higher Technical School in Shibaura, Tokyo, sent Japan’s first radio wave, namely Tokyo Broadcasting Corporation (JOAK). In the following three months, Osaka Radio Station (JOBK) and Nagoya Radio Station (JOCK).
In the beginning, the three radio stations did not violate each other’s well-being, and produced and broadcast independently according to their respective editorial guidelines. Later, the government “felt the need to use broadcasting as a guiding means of national ideology.” In April 1926, the Ministry of Communications ordered the three radio stations to merge to form a new corporate body, the Japan Broadcasting Association, namely The predecessor of NHK today. In 1928, four additional radio stations were added in Hiroshima, Kumamoto, Sendai, and Sapporo, and the original three stations were added to realize the nationwide coverage of the broadcasting network. Sociologist and author of “The History of Japanese Mass Media” said: “Japan’s broadcasting industry has developed as a monopoly from the very beginning under the strong supervision of the government.”