Radio and the Broadcast of National Identity

Radio was the first technology to create a truly mass audience — millions of people hearing the same voice at the same moment. This simultaneity was unprecedented, and its political implications were enormous. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats demonstrated that radio could create intimacy at scale, binding a nation together through the sound of a single voice. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels understood earlier than almost anyone that radio was not merely a medium for transmitting information but a technology for manufacturing consent and mobilizing populations.

In the Middle East, radio became the primary instrument of postcolonial nation-building. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs, broadcasting from Cairo beginning in 1953, did not simply report the news — it constructed a pan-Arab political identity, reaching audiences across borders that colonial powers had drawn and postcolonial states were struggling to enforce. Radio Nasser was propaganda, certainly, but it was also something more: a demonstration that a technology of mass communication could create political communities that transcended the nation-state. The counterexample was equally instructive — Israeli radio broadcasting in Arabic served its own strategic purposes, and the contest between competing Arabic-language broadcasts became a proxy war for regional influence.

The parallel to AI is about the construction of shared reality. Radio showed that whoever controls the broadcast shapes the narrative. AI-powered recommendation systems now perform an analogous function, but in reverse: instead of broadcasting one message to many, they deliver personalized messages to each individual, creating the illusion of shared discourse while actually fragmenting the audience into algorithmically curated information bubbles.

What happens to collective political identity when the technology mediating public discourse is designed for personalization rather than shared experience? And what does the history of state-controlled broadcasting teach us about the risks of concentrated control over AI systems?