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  • Ham Radio’s Technical Culture
  • Douglas Craig (bio)
Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. By Kristen Haring . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Pp xvii+220. $27.95.

In her 1991 book Listening In, Susan J. Douglas described amateur radio broadcasting—or ham radio—as "one of the most important yet least visible subcultures in America." Now, in this brief but intriguing work, Kristen Haring explores the history, culture, and significance of ham radio between the 1930s and the 1970s. In 1935 the FCC issued about 50,000 amateur broadcasting licenses. That number had risen to 200,000 by 1960, and in 2000 there were more than 680,000 radio hams in the United States.

Haring explores why so many men (about 95 percent of all hams in the 1950s were male) have found this hobby so attractive. She explores the culture of ham radio through its key publications, the American Radio Relay League's QST and the commercial publication CQ. Through these sources, along with industry records and government reports, Haring provides a well-written and neatly conceptualized account that follows the evolution of ham radio from its earliest days in the steps of Marconi to its contemporary struggles to maintain its allure in competition with computer hacking and internet blogging.

Ham radio appealed strongly to middle-class urban men who felt simultaneously empowered and threatened by social and industrial change. By forming clubs and joining communities on air, ham radio operators propagated a cult of technical expertise and language—an "advocacy of tinkering" (p. 90)—to provide new foci of belonging within an increasingly isolated world of work and suburban isolation. Haring is at pains to point out that ham radio was more than a simple defensive response; its adherents were often engaged by day in booming electronics and aerospace industries, while employing their technical expertise in their radio shacks by night. Radio hams thus enjoyed a hybrid identity of both professionalism and amateurism, enthusiastically humanizing a complex technology while also benefiting from close links to the enterprises that dominated it.

Ham Radio's Technical Culture also explores more private aspects of the culture of amateur radio broadcasting. Haring provides a fascinating interpretation of ham radio as "a socially sanctioned escape" for men within the home (p. 119). Although an overwhelmingly male pursuit, ham radio is conducted within domestic space. Haring therefore sees its culture as occupying a sometimes uncomfortable intersection between the traditionally male and female spheres of technology and the home. Hams broadcast from private zones of suburban family homes—basements and "shacks"—self-consciously separated from wives and children. Even hams' radio language revealed this separation: wives are "XYLs" (former young ladies) and children are "harmonics"—multiple frequencies that disturb clear transmission. [End Page 901] Under Haring's analysis, however, hams were neither misogynists nor resentful fathers; instead they carved out space and time to fulfill their yearning for freedom and privacy in a world increasingly dominated by suburban life and corporate work.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Haring argues, hams reported to their radio friends that their wives resented this separation—why were their husbands so intent on endless conversation with strangers around the globe rather than with their wives and children at home? By the 1970s these conflicts seemed to lessen, as women gained confidence to pursue their own interests and "husbands gained freedom, as individuals, to spend time and money on ham radio" (p. 133).

Ham Radio's Technical Culture covers these issues, and many besides, incisively. Yet Haring can do only so much with her 162 pages of text. In bringing out the meanings and significance of a century of ham culture, her conclusions sometimes seem too sweeping for their evidentiary bases, and they would have been strengthened by deeper use of comparative analysis of other examples of twentieth-century technical culture. Haring's brief examination of the Citizens Band radio fad of the 1970s needed greater depth and more integration into the book's overall argument to highlight its important role in reviving amateur broadcasting while simultaneously changing that culture's class and regional constituencies. Haring concedes that "no general account of the hobby can adequately convey...

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