Monitoring Dusty War Zones and Tropical Paradises - Being a Broadcast Anthropologist

Presented at The Eleventh HOPE (2016), July 23, 2016, 10 a.m. (60 minutes)

Tuning in distant foreign radio and television stations is a conduit to unique and exotic information. These signals are often confronting, uncensored, and unsanitized. In the western world, we blur or pixelate images of death and torture, but signals from war zones or rebellions show tragedies happening live on the air. Other signals broadcast the joy of life on this planet through exotic song, music, and film. Digital wide-band recordings of the electromagnetic spectrum allow virtual time travel, a form of mental teleportation whereby recorded spectrum is tuned to hear stations as if they were being tuned in real time. Take a virtual tour of Mark's monitoring station in Sydney, Australia which is wired to access the world's mass media via whatever delivery conduit is needed to capture the content. The station receives hundreds of thousands of inbound digital audio and video channels that let him monitor domestic radio and television from most parts of the world. If he wants to watch breakfast television from Tibet, or maybe the nightly news from the remote Pacific islands of Wallis and Futuna, then it's available in perfect studio quality. You'll also see his visits to remote broadcasters and rare, uncensored video from telejournalists that captures the tragedies and joy served up by our planet.


Presenters:

  • Mark Fahey
    Mark Fahey lives in Sydney, Australia and is a biomedical informatics specialist who develops acute-care clinical solutions. His other current projects include Behind the Curtain, a multimedia and print analysis of North Korean propaganda and mind control techniques; Satdirectory, a free-to-air satellite directory; and MediaExplorer, a virtual travel guide to free-to-air digital satellite reception of information about remote lands and intriguing cultures.

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