Global Radio: From Shortwave to Streaming chronicles the development of radio as a global medium. In this book, Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines the evolution of radio from its early uses as little more than a novelty into a set of powerful systems for international exchanges of news, culture, and political influence. In doing so, the book follows the development of radio as a wireless form of the telegraph, its evolution into a medium for sound transmission across the air, and its adaptation to digital networked audio and transmissions technologies. Mohamed also outlines the myriad changes in the radio industry in numerous contexts around the globe and over time, including the early development of commercial and non-commercial broadcasting in the United States, Europe, India, and China and the evolution of so-called “international broadcasters.” As radio played a part in colonial politics, it also figured prominently in the politics of the post-colonial. Within the broader context of global radio, this book examines several former colonies and the transformation of radio from a tool of empire into an instrument of national development. It also focuses on instances in which developing nations have used radio to bridge the gap between rural audiences and digital networked technologies, connecting them to the global information superstructure. Scholars of media studies, communication, radio studies, international relations, and political science will find this book particularly useful.

Shaheed Nick Mohammed's Communication and the Globalization of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders provides a unique perspective on the concept of culture and its fate in the globalized, mediated environment. Acknowledging widespread fears of cultural erosion at the hands of dominant global forces, Mohammed argues that what we understand as culture has always been the product of global forces, including those of trade and exchange. Our very conceptions of culture are questioned. The sanctity of tradition, religion, and heritage, the book suggests, should give way to an appreciation of the quite mundane origins of cultural artifacts, invented often as matters of political or social expedience, adopted sometimes in accidents of history and canonized by time into the catechisms of cultural belief. Communication and the Globalization of Culture also suggests several mechanisms by which pragmatic social practices and fictional discourses make their way into the cultural beliefs and traditions of societies. Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines how the modern globalized environment gives rise to cultural practices that demonstrate cultural inventions, imagined communities, and manufactured cultural products, suggesting that such inventions and imaginations are not uniquely modern but rather a continuation of cultural inventions that long pre-date our media-globalized environment.

The (Dis)information Age challenges prevailing notions about the impact of new information and media technologies. The widespread acceptance of ideas about the socially transformative power of these technologies demands a close and critical interrogation. The technologies of the information revolution, often perceived as harbingers of social transformation, may more appropriately be viewed as tools, capable of positive and negative uses. This book encourages a more rational and even skeptical approach to the claims of the information revolution and demonstrates that, despite a wealth of information, ignorance persists and even thrives. As the volume of information available to us increases, our ability to process and evaluate that information diminishes, rendering us, at times, less informed. Despite the assumed globalization potential of new information technologies, users of global media such as the World Wide Web and Facebook tend to cluster locally around their own communities of interest and even around traditional communities of geography, nationalism, and heritage. Thus new media technologies may contribute to ignorance about various "others" and, in this and many other ways, contribute to the persistence of ignorance.

Distant Voices Near chronicles the development of the popular and contentious Indian radio media subsector in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago from global historical perspectives and explores its implications for culture and national sentiment in the modern context. The work acknowledges the complex discourses surrounding ethnic and cultural identities in this diverse Caribbean nation where numerous groups coexist, among them the descendants of Indian indentured labourers. Shaheed Nick Mohammed employs a media-history approach that recounts the emerging roles of modern communications technology and systems from the development of wireless telegraphy and early radio to the use of streaming and social media and the interplay of social and cultural forces along the way. Within this framework, he also maps the evolution of the Indian radio content genre into its own media subsector and into a business and marketing concern across national media while at the same time boasting global reach. In Distant Voices Near, we learn of international and regional influences as listeners in Trinidad would tune into broadcasts from abroad before local stations were available. Among these influences were international broadcasts from All-India Radio and broadcasts from British Guiana, where descendants of Indian indentured labourers first introduced pay-for-play song request programmes on their local stations. Using documentary research, interviews with programmers and listeners and content analysis, Mohammed examines the precedents of Indian radio in Trinidad, its advent and development, and its emergence into a global presence through live streaming and social media.

Shaheed Nick Mohammed's Communication and the Globalization of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders provides a unique perspective on the concept of culture and its fate in the globalized, mediated environment. Acknowledging widespread fears of cultural erosion at the hands of dominant global forces, Mohammed argues that what we understand as culture has always been the product of global forces, including those of trade and exchange. Our very conceptions of culture are questioned. The sanctity of tradition, religion, and heritage, the book suggests, should give way to an appreciation of the quite mundane origins of cultural artifacts, invented often as matters of political or social expedience, adopted sometimes in accidents of history and canonized by time into the catechisms of cultural belief. Communication and the Globalization of Culture also suggests several mechanisms by which pragmatic social practices and fictional discourses make their way into the cultural beliefs and traditions of societies. Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines how the modern globalized environment gives rise to cultural practices that demonstrate cultural inventions, imagined communities, and manufactured cultural products, suggesting that such inventions and imaginations are not uniquely modern but rather a continuation of cultural inventions that long pre-date our media-globalized environment.