The New Boarder Blasters
I was at work listening to the podcast of On the Media, the November 16, 2007 episode. The final story for the episode was about the Boarder Blaster radio stations and this got me thinking.
According to the story back in the 20's, pirate radio stations were built on the US / Mexican border. These stations were built for two reasons. The Americans who built the stations had been run out of the states for doing things like prescribing patented medicines and running other scams. The Mexican government allowed these stations to be built because they wanted out of a treaty that limited Mexican access to the prime sections of the broadcast radio spectrum.
These stations were very powerful; one of the first was licensed at 50,000 watts, but was built to broadcast up to a million watts. You could listen to this station everywhere in North America. Supposedly you could hear this station on barbwire fences or bed springs and it knocked birds out of the air. These stations were the sources for pop culture; country music, rock 'n roll, televangelists, infomercials and shock jocks were all started on these stations.
This got my brain spinning; I listen to the next generation of Boarder Blasters. Whether it’s Jonathan Coulton's “Thing a Week”, Beatnik Turtle's “Song of the Day”, or the artists involved in the F.U.M.P., C.C. Chapman and Mathew Ebel or other indie music bands and podcasters. New fiction markets like; Stranger Things, Variant Frequency, Jack Mangan’s “Deadpan”, Prometheus Radio Theater, or Escape Pod, and its buds of Pseudo-Pod and Pod-Castle, or the various writers on Podiobooks. Shock shows like Wingin' It 3d, Distorted View and Dawn and Drew. Talk shows like Skepticality, Open Source Sex, Truth Seekers, ShadowDance, The SciPhi Show, Polyamory Weekly, The Dragon Page, I Should Be Writing, and The Geologic Podcast, all of the leaders in Podcasting community.
These people and the varied media they produce, whether its music, shock or talk, are the new Border Blasters. Anytime you download a program you can find open, honest and frank conversations about subjects as diverse as skepticism, sex, politics, alternative religion, philosophy, responsible non-monogamy, literature and writing, any of these subjects and many more. You can see and hear their shows not only in the United States but everywhere in the world. The truly earth shattering and amazing point about the New Media Border Blasters is not the fact that you can listen to shows from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Aberdeen, Australia from Phoenix, Arizona to Paris, France. These conversations are not one way, from the producers to the listeners; instead these conversations go back and forth from listeners to producers and back. Not only podcasters but the participating listeners are the new Border Blasters.
According to the story back in the 20's, pirate radio stations were built on the US / Mexican border. These stations were built for two reasons. The Americans who built the stations had been run out of the states for doing things like prescribing patented medicines and running other scams. The Mexican government allowed these stations to be built because they wanted out of a treaty that limited Mexican access to the prime sections of the broadcast radio spectrum.
These stations were very powerful; one of the first was licensed at 50,000 watts, but was built to broadcast up to a million watts. You could listen to this station everywhere in North America. Supposedly you could hear this station on barbwire fences or bed springs and it knocked birds out of the air. These stations were the sources for pop culture; country music, rock 'n roll, televangelists, infomercials and shock jocks were all started on these stations.
This got my brain spinning; I listen to the next generation of Boarder Blasters. Whether it’s Jonathan Coulton's “Thing a Week”, Beatnik Turtle's “Song of the Day”, or the artists involved in the F.U.M.P., C.C. Chapman and Mathew Ebel or other indie music bands and podcasters. New fiction markets like; Stranger Things, Variant Frequency, Jack Mangan’s “Deadpan”, Prometheus Radio Theater, or Escape Pod, and its buds of Pseudo-Pod and Pod-Castle, or the various writers on Podiobooks. Shock shows like Wingin' It 3d, Distorted View and Dawn and Drew. Talk shows like Skepticality, Open Source Sex, Truth Seekers, ShadowDance, The SciPhi Show, Polyamory Weekly, The Dragon Page, I Should Be Writing, and The Geologic Podcast, all of the leaders in Podcasting community.
These people and the varied media they produce, whether its music, shock or talk, are the new Border Blasters. Anytime you download a program you can find open, honest and frank conversations about subjects as diverse as skepticism, sex, politics, alternative religion, philosophy, responsible non-monogamy, literature and writing, any of these subjects and many more. You can see and hear their shows not only in the United States but everywhere in the world. The truly earth shattering and amazing point about the New Media Border Blasters is not the fact that you can listen to shows from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Aberdeen, Australia from Phoenix, Arizona to Paris, France. These conversations are not one way, from the producers to the listeners; instead these conversations go back and forth from listeners to producers and back. Not only podcasters but the participating listeners are the new Border Blasters.
Labels: new media, podcasting, revolution
posted by C.A. Sizemore | 3:30 PM
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