“The Medium and the Message/Il medium e il messaggio”

In the year 2015, thirty years after the death of Orson Welles and one hundred after Marconi’s victory in the lawsuit brought to him by Tesla to establish the ownership of the patent, a Cultural Studies class a study of the role of radio in the formation of the North American imagination in the 20th century became an opportunity to experiment with interdisciplinary didactics. The educational project was aimed at highlighting the dynamics of the discursive constructions conveyed by a medium which, especially to the generation of digital natives, offers extreme forms of perception in distraction. It focused also on the evolutionary processes of radio as an electronic device. From miniaturization and the subsequent portability which turned it from an interior decoration item into an accessory, to the identification of the boombox as an object of investigation the step was short. The experiment was made possible by the collaboration of an urbanist from the University of Reggio Calabria and the assistance of Radio Zammù, the broadcaster of the University of Catania that was — and still is — run by former students. The crossover between the medium and the electronic device in suburbs populated by individuals largely excluded from the American Dream, and the confrontation with different disciplinary fields and their professionals allowed the students to shed light on phenomena that tend to remain invisible when addressed only from a theoretical angle. Eventually, storyboards were created and videos shot by putting the object in the context of the Sicilian urban landscape where the boombox appears as an apparatus in the Foucauldian sense of the term.