WE WERE BLIND: ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

"All the light we cannot see" is a Pulitzer prize winning book and movie.  A main theme is that two different characters both listen to a third broadcasting over long distance radio transmission, sometime in the 1930s.  One of the characters is blind,  but neither sees the broadcaster.   Radio, the transmission of audio signals by electromagnetic radiation,  was developed in the late 19th century, and became the major mode of long distance communication in the early part of the 20th century.  A radio set can have both transmission and reception capabilities,  but most popular systems involved a few powerful transmitters beaming to multiple receivers around the region (or country).  It is  a method of auditory mass communication and had a profound effect on social systems.  Until radio,  people depended on face to face interaction,  or brief (telegraph) or extended (newspaper) written communication.  Radio  transmitted live voice in real time (and music, etc), creating centers of persuasive influence.  It unified countries for better (as in Roosevelt's reassurances during the economic depression) or worse (as in Hitler's rise to mislead Germany).  Radio was the basis for the metaphoric "light we cannot see", and removed the role of direct visual information in experience,  while augmenting auditory.  Sporting events now had a way of sharing the experience using sportscasters to described the play-by-play events,  adding their own excitement to the descriptions.  And politicians could reach many more people than meetings and railroad connections.  But the listeners were missing some vital information, like the fact that Roosevelt was physically crippled by polio during all these broadcasts.

Radio was the beginning of the process of distancing human communication from face-to-face interaction while preserving some natural human experience.  It augmented the value of auditory verbal communication skills that included  emotional messaging.  (At the same time, at the turn of the century,  Edison enhanced the illusion of movement into "movies" creating a method of transferring visual information.  It would take several decades to evolve this into an audio-visual signal that could be transmitted over distances. )

The power of radio,  and the power of silent movies derives, at least partly, from the isolation and intensification of one sense as primary.  Blind people are better at hearing things,  and respond more fully to sounds.  The deaf are more attentive to visual signals and can "read lips" in ways that allow some understanding of speech.  When the two components are joined together in transmission,  some of the focus of separate senses is lost,  and techniques of enhancement,  lighting, audio processing, etc. are used to strengthen the sense of presence and emotional significance in audio-visual combined modes.

The story All the light we cannot see describes the focused experience of radio transmission, how it impacted and unified groups of people, and was used by authoritarian regimes.  After WWII "Radio Free Europe" represented this effort to promote "democracy" to dominated European countries.  We are all blind to discerning the manipulative processes in communication unless we "tune in" to understand them