little wireless magazines

Wireless, meaningless, save that we know
that another man in a far away land
stands by the side of a gibbering spark,
punching his message into the dark.

Into the dark of a Summer’s night,
and around the world and into the light
of our brilliant Winter day
speeds the vibrant, quivering ray.

And, caught in the web of sky flung wires,
sinks to earth, chatters, expires;
But before it dies, skillful hands of man
have torn from its soul a Marconigram.

▸ K. G. Martin, “Wireless,” 1904

I

F. T. MARINETTI DESPISED the book.¹ Sure, he was a publisher himself, an upstart who founded Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’ in 1910, but this didn’t keep him from lashing out against the datedness of a print medium that stubbornly stuck around even after the arrival of the wireless telegraph, radio broadcasting, and the telephone.² In 1916, he was already predicting that cinema would end up “killing the book” once and for all, and by 1933, when the radio had become a popular mass medium, he was still hurling insults, calling the book “heavy, strangled, suffocating, fossilized, and stodgy.”³ By 1941, nothing had changed. “We are in the twentieth century,” a frustrated Marinetti was still raging, “era of the motor that runs at 700 km/h, the electric train at 160, of radio, of automatic weapons. How is it possible that the book is in practically the same condition as when it was first created?”⁴

Good question. The technology of the book, in spite of its stodginess, has outlived him, and reanimated by wireless networks and the portability of digital devices, it doesn’t show signs of dying out anytime soon. That said, Marinetti’s dire predictions throughout the first half of the twentieth century were tied to a much bigger problem for avant-garde movements: how can you be modern and still rely on an outmoded print medium like the book for the distribution of your texts? Typographical experiments and the destruction of syntax were one way to liberate the page; but the words (when they were not being read out loud onstage or later into a microphone) were still on the page, and more often than not, that page was part of a bound volume, one with a cover and all of the other bibliographical accoutrements in between. As experimental as the Italian Futurists may have been with materials, formatting, and even size and shape, they never escaped from the tyranny of a design that was as old as the codex.

That’s only part of the story: as much as Marinetti wanted to kill the book once and for all, he only halfheartedly took a jab at the rivista, the other print medium he accused of being “always pedantic” (sempre pedantica), a term in his lexicon that was synonymous with “academic” or passatista. In order to survive, Futurism, and every other avant-garde movement with global ambitions thereafter, needed the rivista. It was the only way to consolidate a program, distribute ideas quickly, and amass a readership spread out over thousands of miles in multiple directions.

The rivista made Futurism possible: and we’ve known that for a long time.⁵ But if we are at all interested in trying to explain why this statement might be true, then we need to ask a slightly different question. Why were there so many of them? Why wasn’t a single little magazine or even a dozen of them strategically placed in influential metropolitan centers ever enough to spread the word?⁶ I realize that with the Italian Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist movements, there was a lot of infighting that led to splinter groups eager to defect. It is also true that there are numerous cases in which the crossing of different avant-garde strains created strange hybrids like Zenit in Zagreb (later Belgrade), Mavo in Tokyo, 75HP in Bucharest, and Klaxon in São Paolo. But even if we consider the fact that these non-European magazines were an inevitable by-product of a Western-based international avant-garde print network, how do we account for the fact that in three decades the Futurists alone produced more than 100 titles within Italy and Dada managed to generate somewhere around 175 in more than a dozen countries in less than eight years?

This is not the kind of question that can be answered by compiling another list of titles or even by tracking down, whenever possible, empirical data that will let us map out distribution routes. Rather, a different approach is needed, one that considers the production of avant-garde magazines alongside the arrival of other communications technologies emerging at the same time. Wireless telegraphy was one of them. In its most basic terms, wireless was a mode of communication built around the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves. Telegraphic messages had been circulating back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean by way of underwater cables since 1858, but Guglielmo Marconi’s great discovery of the wireless in 1895 involved, among other things, joining a Morse Code machine to a spark gap transmitter that could break electrical signals into short and long as they traveled at the speed of light: these signals were subsequently converted by a trained operator on the other end into a string of letters, words, and abbreviated phrases corresponding with a code that could be read.⁷ By 1901, the first transatlantic wireless transmission was dispatched from Cornwall to Newfoundland (three thousand miles), and it was followed up in 1915 by the first transatlantic wireless voice transmission.

“In the tangled web of media ecology,” Katherine Hayles has observed, “change anywhere in the system stimulates change everywhere in the system.”⁸ The little magazine was no exception. So if we want to understand how this change in a larger “media ecology” helped shape Futurism as a movement, then we need to see the little magazine in relation to the arrival of wireless telegraphy, especially when considering how agonizingly slow, unreliable, and maybe a little premodern it would have seemed at a time when messages could be transmitted from a single location, travel invisibly through electromagnetic waves, and get picked up almost instantaneously by a receiver hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Marinetti first paid homage to his compatriot Marconi by adapting the Italian phrase telegrafia senza fili (telegraphy without wires) for his essay-manifesto L’immaginazione senza fili (Imagination without wires), one of his earliest and most influential statements on Futurist poetry.⁹ “Imagination without wires” was Marinetti’s way of describing a new form of poetic communication that could thrive in an age of x-rays, automobiles, and wireless. By abolishing syntax, removing punctuation, omitting adverbs and adjectives, and embracing nouns and the infinitive, the poet could liberate words from the straitjacket of a grammatical structure and a linguistic system that limits the speed by which messages could be sent and received.

In 1913, when L’immaginazione senza fili was published in the Florentine-based Lacerba, Marinetti was still using the word wireless more as an analogy to describe a “telegraphic style” through which the Futurist poet could communicate with his audience. “He [the Futurist poet] will thus convey life’s analogical bedrock, telegraphically,” Marinetti explained, “that is, with the same economic rapidity that the telegraph imposes on reporters and war correspondents in their summary reports.”¹⁰ Making poetry more like the wireless, however, was not simply about the economy of language and syntax. The poem itself, which was communicated on paper, depended on the visual production of onomatopoeic “sounds” that could convey a multisensory experience to the reader: words were seen, but through the use of experimental page layouts and typefaces, they could also be heard, smelled, and touched.

Between 1910 and 1940, wireless communication went through a number of different stages.¹¹ At first, it was known primarily as a writing technology: electromagnetic waves were sent and received by Morse Code machines, with operators to translate the sequences of short and long signals. By the early 1920s, telegraphy was still widely used, but wireless telephony had been adapted to transmit sound through vacuum tubes. By 1930, radio stations existed in cities around the globe, making transcontinental programming possible. Critics interested in the Futurists’ technological imagination have tended to focus on the impact of wireless on their experiments with poetry, the visual arts, theater, and photography, but along the way, they’ve ignored just how this invention challenged the Futurists to invent new strategies for print communication.¹²

As interested as Marinetti and his collaborators may have been in the effects of the wireless telegraph on words, syntax, bodily sensation, and the experience of time and space, their consolidation as a movement depended on something even more ambitious: the creation of a wireless magazine network that could transmit Futurist ideas rapidly across Italy.¹³ Nowadays, the term wireless magazine could be used to describe the digital magazines we access through mobile reading devices.¹⁴ But going back one hundred years, it identifies a Futurist technology that was evolving in response to a nonprint medium. The little magazine, of course, was still made of paper; it traveled by post, bookstore (bookstall), and pass-along readerships; and it required turning the page by hand. What made the magazine particularly modern for Futurism was the way it could be adapted as a communications technology. And here is the double bind: the Futurists were always looking ahead for the next innovation, but they were constrained, as often happens, by the practical limits in the present. In this case, the magazine and the wireless were separate technologies, neither of them ready to unite so that print could be transformed into electromagnetic waves or pixels on a screen. And yet none of it would ever be possible if there wasn’t someone willing (and able) to fantasize about the possibility that such an invention could ever see the light of day.

Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler have observed that the arrival of new media technologies doesn’t automatically lead to the obsolescence of the older ones they often surpass in speed and efficiency. No matter how revolutionary they might seem, these new media technologies are often structured around the older media out of which they emerge: no typewriting without handwriting, no film without photography, and no radio broadcasting without wireless telegraphy. When it comes to the little magazine and the wireless telegraph, a process of “remediation” is very much on display as well, but there’s a marked difference. Instead of having the newer technology (wireless) appropriate the older one (print), the reverse happens: the older medium adapts to the advances offered by the newer one.¹⁵ In this instance, I’m talking specifically about the impact of wireless on the formation of a print communications network across Italy. Generally speaking, there are three different expressions of this impact, all of them overlapping: writing telegraphically, distributing telegraphically, and broadcasting wirelessly. In the first instance, wireless is associated with the act of writing in the telegraphic style. In the second, it is another way to think about a point-to-point model for sending and receiving messages. In the third, broadcasting becomes a unidirectional way to send messages to multiple sources from a single destination.

In Futurism’s early years (1910-1914), things start off slowly, and there is more of an interest in writing telegraphically than there is in distributing telegraphically. Marinetti’s “Lettre d’une jolie femme à un monsieur passéiste” (1914), for instance, documents an imagined wireless exchange between a beautiful young woman and an older man. The oversized address Chèr (with the pun on the English word chair at the bottom) frames the message, and the mathematical symbols contained therein are interspersed with requests for money, jewelry, and shoes (figure 6.1). This letter captures how the arrangement of a discreet rendezvous might sound when communicated through a third party at the telegraph office: tomorrow, my house, I’m serious, three Futurist kisses. But it is also the printed representation of this mysterious wireless process. Messages are getting typed out by a telegraph operator, Futurist poetry’s midwife, and they arrive seconds later at another destination without ever leaving any material trace of the journey in between: no postage stamp, no wrinkles on the envelope, no postmark, no lipstick or perfume, only the message, which arrived first as a sequence of electromagnetic signals before getting converted into words.

6.1 F. T. Marinetti, “Lettre d’une jolie femme à un monsieur passéiste” (1914-1919). Courtesy of Giovanni Lista.

Two unpublished poems from the same year—known by the generic titles “Telegramma 41” and “Telegramma 69”—also tackle the mystery of the wireless process. Using official telegraph forms, Marinetti composed a handwritten poem filled with lines, numbers, mathematical signs, and letters of various sizes (figure 6.2). As chaotic as it all looks, the image manages to convey a simple message about wireless movement. The lines, arrows, x’s and spirals are the material representation on the page of the invisible journey that electromagnetic waves make through the air, the ones that no one ever sees when wireless messages travel from one place to another. Indeed, by 1914, sending and receiving telegrams wirelessly was already a common practice, but a poem like this one only reaffirms the strangeness of it all: invisible signals move between transmitters and receivers and bounce from one antenna to another, generating, finally, a material document, transcribed by an agent at the telegraph office, that could be picked up and read.¹⁶ Individuals at the beginning of the twentieth century might have been communicating faster and farther than ever before, but the experience could be disorienting. And that might help explain the presence of an oversized X at the bottom in the box reserved for the sender’s name and address. In this case, X should mark the spot, but instead it opens up a host of possibilities about where the sender actually is: here, there, everywhere, nowhere?

6.2 F. T. Marinetti, “Telegramma 41” (1914-1915). Private collection.

As the Futurists were quick to realize, wireless could be adapted for the print experience, and the Dadaists who followed their lead capitalized on its power as a writing technology.¹⁷ This identification of the wireless transmission with a writing system was crucial because it helps to explain just how avant-garde little magazines could be modern in a way that the book, which was made up of a single dispatch before being published, could not. Dada did not move beyond the written word, and it certainly wasn’t ready (or able) to do away with the printing press: it moved beyond the traditional methods through which words could travel, get transcribed, reproduced, and finally, read.

As part of this process, the page was the place to experiment with the wireless transmission. The Futurists, of course, may have been quick to play around with styles of wireless writing, but as Dada spread between 1918 and 1926, it became a familiar feature in its magazines as well. In some cases, “TSF” (telegrafia senza fili) appeared on the page to designate the illusion of instantaneous communication; in others, it was part of an elaborate representation of the wireless process (figure 6.3). It could be argued that these various examples document the failure of the magazine to do what wireless does. The “TSF,” one might say, is on the page precisely because the magazine was unable to move without wires. And yet the frequent presence of wireless symbols, conventions, and devices in the magazine is also a sign that the two did, in fact, share something in common after all: communication.

6.3 “TSF,” 75HP (November 1924), 3.

Though slower than wireless, the magazine was a delivery system for information with the capacity to send and receive on a serial basis (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or bimonthly). In addition, it was the one print medium capable of establishing extensive links between places and people, and it did so in a way that no book, manifesto, or newspaper could.¹⁸ Last but not least, the magazine let individuals take complete control over the production and consumption process, and that was because it was not made for a commercial marketplace and there was no need to make it available to anyone outside the coterie readership. As remarkable as wireless was at the time, then, it did have limits. Though certainly accessible as a service to a wider public, wireless technology was still under governmental control, and because messages were transmitted from official wireless stations, communication between individuals was always mediated by the operator responsible for tapping the message on one end or typing/writing it onto a telegram at the other. The little magazine was a place in which private correspondence was possible, giving Dada groups the freedom to print whatever they wanted and, just as important, to make their material available to readers without worrying about anyone peeking over their shoulder.

For Ljubomir Micić, “radiotelegraphy” was at the very core of this wireless print experience, and from the moment he launched Zenit in Zagreb (1921), it was a consistent preoccupation of his.¹⁹ “Zenitist art,” he explained in the founding manifesto, “must be a radiogram,” a term that gets used in his editorials, poems, and articles as shorthand for modern communication. Micić was so intent on mobilizing wireless for his plan to “Balkanize Europe” that he claimed, no doubt to Marinetti’s horror, Nikolai Tesla (not Marconi) as its inventor.²⁰ But instead of trying to take over the airwaves, Micić used the magazine: it was the medium that allowed him to assemble avant-garde signals from around the world, mixing designs and ideas from Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Dadaism into a “Barbarogenius” concoction he called “Zenitism.”

Zenit played up its status as the Yugoslav outsider in an international avant-garde scene.²¹ In practical terms, this meant that Micić could pick and choose whatever he wanted from each group: Futurist rhetoric, Constructivist design, and Dada typography. The Zenitist movement existed primarily in the pages of a magazine published in Yugoslavia, and it was, as Darko Šimičić points out, “the only form of communication with the international art world.”²² For that reason, Zenit was made to function primarily as a receiver, the one catching signals from abroad. But in five years, it also tuned in to every major avant-garde movement, publishing works in the original languages and inviting “foreign” artists/writers to edit and design issues.

When Micič declared that Zenitist art must be a “radiogram,” he was thinking about the materiality of the wireless transmission, modern art and writing as an expression of this speed and connectedness. His “Shimmy at the Latin Quarter Graveyard,” for instance, is an attempt to capture the wireless process in words, a “radio-film in 17 acts” that unfolds on the page without any moving pictures or sound:

A field near St. Petersburg. Tatlin’s monument reaches up to cloud-bergs. On its top is a Radio Center+400m. Devouring a deluge of impulses from Asia Europe the Balkans America China and Japan. A sharp-electricity conductor sports the head of an eternally vital bourgeois. Network: MOSCO W-Petersburg-Tokyo-Peking-Bombay-Constantinople-Alexandria-Belgrade-Zagreb-Milan-Prague-Warsaw-Riga-Berlin-New York-PARIS. Orient airplanes ready to rush all the continents of the Globe. Radio stations controlled by Zenitists.²³

Organized in two columns and positioned halfway through the March 1922 issue of Zenit, this “Zenitist radio-film” describes the wireless system in the telegraphic style. The radio tower at the top of Vladimir Tatlin’s monument—which was designed but never built—receives “impulses” from avant-garde artists and writers around the globe, including Karel Teige, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Raoul Hausmann, and Ivan Goll. St. Petersburg is part of a network that includes sixteen other cities, all of them connected by hyphens, which, on the page, resemble Morse Code dashes. Because these dispatches are lined up, it is tempting to think that they are arriving in sequence. They are not: each one is arriving at Tatlin’s monument from a different source at the same time.

The Zenitist Branko Ve Poljanski, Micič’s brother, took the idea of writing wirelessly one step further by designing a Zenitist radiogram that adapted conventions from the standard telegraph form. Zenit-Ekspres includes the title and logo at the heading, complete with an exclamation point to add urgency, followed below by a collection of dispatches reporting his brother’s activities in Munich-Paris-Berlin (figure 6.4). No one would confuse this radiogram with the real thing, but what’s so compelling here is the way that different writing and wireless technologies have been combined: the letter (which contains the formal address and salutations), the circular (which would announce an upcoming event), the telegram (written in the telegraphic style), and the news bulletin (extra! extra!). Marinetti might have co-opted the actual forms and the abbreviated style for his earlier parole in libertà, but Poljanski has managed to do something different; he’s produced a wireless fake by adapting print styles, techniques, and conventions that would have been appearing in avant-garde magazines like Zenit. If the contents of this radiogram read like a letter (with an address and salutation), the black bars on the right and the enlarged headlines on the left are there to interrupt each paragraph, making it impossible for readers to feel as if a document of this sort could ever have arrived by post.

6.4 Zenit-Ekspres:Paris, Berlin, München (1922).

6.5 “Aviograma,” 75HP (November 1924), 2.

The single issue of 75HP is another striking example. It was conceived as an extended wireless transmission in print. Published in Bucharest in October 1924, the entire issue borrowed the design, initials, and layout of the wireless telegram to advertise “pictopoezie,” a form of picture poetry invented by Victor Brauner and Ilarie Voronca. 75HP is, as the title suggests, built for speed, and its asymmetrical design in red, black, and yellow typeface, often separating blocks of print with headlines in bold, makes it seem as if the pages themselves are moving (figure 6.5). Instead of Brauner and Voronca launching their movement with a manifesto, they put together an “Aviogram” in bold red letters, complete with a series of telegraphic phrases.²⁴ One in particular—“the telegraph has woven wire rainbows”—captures the spirit in which the others are written: they are condensed poetic statements, a series of transmissions that would be more at home in the pages of the magazine than at the telegraph office.²⁵

This is one of the key points to emphasize when discussing the technologies of the magazine and wireless together. Far from becoming obsolete, the magazine was getting reconceived as a modern technology precisely because it could do what no wireless actually could. By using wireless operators, individual messages could be sent and received, but where, in the end, was the work of art? For these Dada and neo-Dada groups, it was the materiality of the transmission that mattered precisely because it generated new ways of thinking about the printed word within the medium of the magazine. 75HP’s wireless performance in print raises some questions about the possibilities and limits of wireless technologies for avant-garde movements in the first half of the 1920s. By 1924, radio broadcasting was taking off; but there was still no robust infrastructure to support it internationally, and broadcast access was difficult to obtain, especially for artists disconnected from the relevant commercial or political channels. The print appropriation of wireless—both in the distribution discussed earlier and in the adaptation of wireless print conventions—represents a compromise of sorts, one that reaffirmed the fact that wireless print distribution remained the most viable option for experimental writers and artists. Thus, by relying largely on the magazine for communication, the Dadaists and other affiliated avant-garde groups were not just being practical. They were adapting the medium—both on its own terms and as part of a network—precisely because it could function as an effective modern communications technology and site for artistic experimentation in a way that no telegraph or radio ever could.

II

An avant-garde village was never going to be built through the occasional production of a wireless poem. Rather, it would involve rethinking how to be wireless with the magazines themselves. In what follows, I focus specifically on the wireless tactics the Italian Futurists experimented with to develop modes for distribution that would allow them to draw more members into their network at a higher velocity. Simply putting ideas into print was never going to be enough: messages had to be fast and go far, and what Marinetti said about the Futurists in Paris applied to everyone involved: they had to become “large radio transmitters” (grands émetteurs de radios) if the movement was ever going to move.²⁶ The poet as transmitter: that, in effect, was Marinetti’s goal. In reality, these “large radio transmitters” were not wireless at all since they relied on magazines to communicate with one another. But even here, you get the point: the transmission of the printed word was being reconceptualized to accommodate the arrival of a more efficient, and indeed more modern, technology. Before the Futurists had any stable infrastructure in place, they distributed their messages and manifestos largely through newspapers, and the response was, as we know, an unequivocal success. And when it came to the international circulation of the movement, they relied heavily on international avant-garde magazines as well, many of them eager to capitalize on the prestige conferred by the association. The Futurist magazines within Italy, however, worked differently. Some of them established connections with sympathetic avant-gardes elsewhere; but the main focus of their distribution was domestic, and it was concerned principally with maximizing the number of supporters across Italy. “Universo cartaceo,” or “Paper Universe,” is the phrase Claudia Salaris uses to describe the end result.²⁷ But I want to emphasize above all that it was always rotating around an Italian sun, and there was never any question that Futurism, no matter how worldly, was dependent, finally, on the loyalty, support, and interest of groups and individuals within the country where it first started.

Futurist magazines worked through a tactic of saturation: the more titles in circulation, the better the chances the movement could consolidate (more about this point later). Writing to Lev Trotsky in 1922 about Marinetti’s incredible skill as a cultural propagandist, Antonio Gramsci didn’t see it this way. In fact, he was more convinced that a magazine like Lacerba in 1913, with its print run of three thousand (Marinetti claimed eighteen thousand), was the high-water mark for the movement, and he looked at the proliferation of Futurist magazines in the years after World War I only as a sign of certain disintegration: “The Futurist group of Marinetti doesn’t exist anymore. The old rivista of Marinetti, Poesia, is now run by a certain Mario Dessi, a man without the minimum organizational or intellectual capacity. In the south, especially in Sicily, they publish many Futurist magazines, for which Marinetti writes articles: but these magazines are published by students that confuse Futurism with an ignorance of Italian grammar.”²⁸ For Gramsci, newspapers, manifestos, and magazines had the power to unify political and artistic movements alike, but they needed to be carefully monitored if they were ever going to collectivize readers in a way that would lead not just to the destruction necessary for revolution but also the creative rebuilding that follows. “The editorial line,” he writes elsewhere in an essay on the subject of print media, “should be highly organized so as to make an intellectually homogeneous product, while respecting the necessary variety of styles and literary personalities.”²⁹ It was this monitoring, he goes on, that made the entire prospect of a “unitary cultural organism” possible, so that Marinetti, by letting the magazine get away from him, was, in Gramsci’s assessment at least, losing control of the movement.³⁰

What Gramsci saw as a sign of Futurism’s collapse was, in reality, its saving grace. The Futurist movement may have been fragmenting in the early 1920s, with some of its most loyal supporters from the teens defecting because of Marinetti’s turn away from political life (a situation made worse, no doubt, by Marinetti’s much reduced finances), that is true, but its continued survival for two more decades was made possible by the ongoing production of its magazines, even those created by the students in Sicily who continued to confuse Futurist writing with “an ignorance of Italian grammar.”³¹ This change was set in motion a decade earlier when Marinetti first closed down the wildly successful pre-Futurist Poesia (1905-1909), which I discussed in chapter 3. Instead of shutting down Poesia, Marinetti could have completed the Futurist takeover when he first printed the foundational manifesto of his new movement in its pages; but he did not.³²

This decision to abandon Poesia was more than a symbolic break with Marinetti’s high-profile Symbolist past. It was tied up with a “totally different” approach, as Marinetti later called it, another tactic for communication that would rely on the magazine but require different strategies for its mobilization.³³ Instead of making a single magazine work like a magnet to attract an international group of writers to Italy, he began to think about the expansion of an entire movement from Italy. Poesia, of course, attracted some of the most celebrated poets of the day, and its distribution list, as indicated on the back cover, was extensive. But in spite of its success, Poesia was a magazine for poets, many of them from a particular school; it was not a movement. Futurism had a different objective from the very beginning: it would not be limited to a single genre or medium, and it would adapt modern technologies in order to maximize artistic production and reception. Communication, of course, was paramount to the success or failure of the entire venture. Futurists learned to work with new media so that transmission could be sped up and the aesthetic effects fully realized. By closing down Poesia, Futurism, then, was rejecting an older production/distribution model, thereby opening itself up to other possibilities for making the movement cohere.

Here is how it worked: instead of Marinetti taking on the role as primary editor, as he had done with Poesia, he regularly teamed up with collaborators (as with Lacerba, Dinamo, Stile futurista) or assumed a role from behind the scenes (as with L’Italia futurista, Roma futurista, Noi, Dinamo futurista, Futurismo/Sant’Elia/Artecrazia).³⁴ These varied editorial roles gave him the freedom (and the time) to be in several places at once, thereby increasing the number of magazines in circulation between Bari and Milan, Naples and Trieste. Futurist magazines did pop up in countries outside of Italy but only rarely, and the ones that did establish an affiliation with the movement were never successful in enlisting Marinetti as a foreign editor.³⁵

Many magazines instead of one: it was a simple solution. The Futurist movement was, among other things, a print network connecting urban centers with regional satellite groups and lone sympathizers that could plug in from wherever they happened to be. Though the newspaper may have allowed for the international circulation of manifestos, the magazines published within Italy functioned more like a collection of transmitters capable of generating chatter on a weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or bimonthly basis, delivering messages about local and international Futurist events and publications, and reaffirming the protocol for communication within the movement.³⁶ Impermanence was built into the entire experience: though magazines would arrive serially, they were meant for short-term consumption. For that reason, the reproducibility of the magazine over time—including the large number of single issues—was an integral part of a communication process that emphasized the “live” nature of the conversation above all else, one that was responding to the cultural and political conditions on the ground in real time.

Within Italy, the magazine was critical to the centralization of Futurism. For three decades and in more than thirty cities and towns, different magazines popped up every year across Italy—new titles coming in, older ones disappearing—but there was never any question about where the movement was based. And this is where the influence of the wireless comes in. These magazines were not isolated across Italy at any point: they were connected to one another, working together to produce a movement without wires. In fact, while these magazines were sites for interaction and exchange, the primary medium for organizing activities, events, and ideas, they were also the material expression of an abstract social relationship that unified members across time and space. Being a Futurist, then, was an activity intimately bound up with the production and consumption of its magazines. The little magazine was born into a wireless world, caught in one of those “epochal transitions” (Raymond Williams) in which the residual cultural element is being replaced by an emergent one with “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships.”³⁷ A new communications technology (first wireless telegraphy, then radio broadcasting) was emerging, but the older one (print in the magazine) was still firmly in place. The magazine itself was not going wireless at this historical moment, but it could be modified (or modernized) to accommodate radically new ways of thinking about communication and the possibilities and limits of connectivity. In the end, the wireless magazine was the product of this compromise between two competing communications technologies, neither of them capable of fully supplanting the other.

What took shape in Italy between 1910 and 1944 was a wireless model for magazine distribution that included thirty-two cities and towns (figure 6.6).³⁸ Like the wireless telegraph, the magazine was subtended by a material infrastructure. In this case, the printers functioned like trained operators tapping the Morse Code keys; the magazines were the telegrams; the post office, newsstands, and bookstores were the wireless/telegraph offices where messages could be sent and received (for people without subscriptions). The Futurists were not just making more magazines than any other single literary or artistic movement in history; they were changing just how a medium like the magazine could be used to construct a national communications network. In the first decade (1910-1920), when Futurism began to insert itself aggressively into Italian cultural life, magazine production fell into two main categories: the titles created by regional satellite groups, many of them single issues, and the “official” magazines set up by Marinetti and his allies in Milan. Together they formed the nucleus of the movement, the “official” magazines establishing protocol by issuing directives, outlining the artistic and/or political program, and providing a model for magazine production, the satellites opening up lines of communication in places outside the northern, mostly urban orbit (Naples, Ragusa, Messina, Calabria, etc.).

If you break the information down by year and duration, in fact, you get an even clearer picture of what was involved in this process in the beginning (figure 6.7). Lacerba (1913-1915), L’Italia futurista (1916-1918), Roma futurista (1918-1920), and Dinamo (1919), though different in their focus on Futurist art and politics, provided the secure foundation on which the other magazines could be built. In this first decade, there was Marinetti’s break with Lacerba, which led to the creation of the highly nationalistic, prowar L’Italia futurista, followed by the politically oriented Roma futurista, and, finally, culminating in one devoted exclusively to visual art and literature, Dinamo.³⁹

On average, five magazines were “live” in any given year, and though Marinetti could not possibly have assumed editorial control over each one, he actively monitored the style and content of the message and helped with the distribution whenever possible.⁴⁰ Between 1910 and 1919, twenty-nine magazines were printed (some as supplements), leaving us to account for the seventy or so that followed in the 1920s and ’30s. What we see in the beginning is a relatively conservative model for organizing the movement. Marinetti and his allies created an official hub in Milan (with him working mostly behind the scenes with other editors), and the others popped up to provide an outlet for their ideas and/or a material expression of their support.⁴¹ But in looking at this information of Futurist magazine production over a map of Italy, something else emerges: Milan may have functioned as an official hub for the movement, producing more titles than anywhere else, but Rome was equally if not more important. Only two titles appeared here (compared with the seven of Milan), but, if you include only those issues of L’ardito printed in 1919 when Marinetti and Carli were still involved with the L’ardito movement, they produced more issues during that period than anywhere else (eighty-seven total). In this way, the movement itself becomes more than the man, and Futurism’s importance in Italian cultural life gets reaffirmed by degrees of cultural production in the capital.

6.6 Riviste Futuriste, 1910-1944.

6.7 Riviste Futuriste, 1910-1919.

Before examining just how and why this model changed in the decades that followed, it’s worth thinking through this association between movement and medium as well. What, after all, is a movement? Marinetti first used the term movimento when announcing the birth of Futurism in the founding manifesto, and it seems logical enough that any avant-garde group would try to imagine itself occupying as much international or domestic space as possible in order to create the illusion that it’s everywhere. A static Futurism, in other words, does not a movement make, and without a medium like the magazine, this kinetic effect would not have been possible to generate. Looking at it, as I just did, in relation to the number of titles “live” in any given year, we also discover that looks can be deceiving. Futurism was never everywhere, not even close: it had a handful of locations, some of them more active than others, and with the exception of Rome, Milan, and Naples (home to Vela latina), there was never any reason to assume they would continue to generate more titles.

Mapping out some of this information lets us see the Italian Futurist movement less as a stable entity and more as a living organism that actually changed shape over time with the constant rising and falling of magazine titles and the urban and regional relationships that were formed month by month, year by year, and decade by decade across Italy. Indeed, we may already know that print was the primary vehicle for Futurist communication, but to understand how the magazine, in particular, functioned, it’s useful to map out, whenever possible, some of these relationships, trace the time frames, identify moments of overlap, and figure out the extent to which magazines were syncing up and dropping out. Take the following three examples, one per decade:

 

1918 (until May 1920): Roma futurista, a weekly, is founded to fashion Futurism as a political party. During that same year, magazines also appear in Naples, Ferrara, Milan, and Florence (figure 6.8).

1923 (until November 11, 1926): Il futurismo / Le futurisme, an irregular monthly, comes out of Milan (with two issues printed in Rome). Magazines also appear in Bologna, Gorizia, Trieste, Cesena, Capri, Parma, and Salerno (figure 6.9).

1932 (until November 26, 1933): Futurismo, a fortnightly and then a weekly and then a fortnightly again, gets published in Rome as a newly established flagship. Magazines also come out in Milan, Bari, Rovereto, Piacenza, and Turin (figure 6.10).

 

When seen from these different angles, the architecture of the Futurist magazine network begins to emerge more clearly: an official magazine gets planted in a major metropolitan city such as Milan or Rome with five or six satellite stations planted somewhere else in Italy. These “nonofficial” magazines cater to a particular town, city, or region for a short period of time, while the official ones are there to generate directives and offer support. The eponymously titled Il futurismo / Le futurisme, for instance, was first created “as a continuation of the manifestos published as leaflets by the Direzione del Movimento Futurista,” and the editors even decided to keep “the same layout and typeface” so that members would make the connection.⁴² And Mina Somenzi’s Futurismo was created primarily to “link” the headquarters in Rome with the provinces, catering to a wide range of interests, including theater, radio, cinema, fashion, architecture, commercial art, and cooking.⁴³ Such an eclectic range of topics in the pages of a single magazine was there to demonstrate that Futurism could be found everywhere in everyday life, making it the ideal aesthetic expression of a Fascist culture and politics.

6.8 Riviste Futuriste, 1918.

6.9 Riviste Futuriste, 1923.

6.10 Riviste Futuriste, 1932.

With each passing year, the locations of Futurist satellite groups would frequently change, but there was always a center around which they could collect (and connect if desired). And if the ambitions of the movement were international, they were expressed through a system of carefully managed national linkages that allowed members in different cities, regions, and towns to transmit and receive information. A whole range of promotional activities and media were mobilized for this purpose, but the magazine was different. Seriality made it renewable (new); the cheap production made it portable (could travel from place to place); packaging in bulk made it postable (discounted mailing for subscribers). In addition, the magazine was the one medium that would allow readers to see for themselves how members near and far could be together as producers (not just consumers) of Futurism, inhabiting the same national space. Anthologies, of course, could be useful for this particular end as well, but they had too much in common with books; and as much as they provided occasional moments of consolidation, they were, finally, unable to keep up the pace over time.

The 1920s presents a special case: the number of magazines produced during this period increases significantly (forty-six total), but there is no stable sequence of “official” magazines in place (figure 6.11). The Italian-French Il futurismo / Le futurisme lasts longer than any of them, but in four years, only fourteen issues were produced, making it more of an occasional print outlet than a central station.⁴⁴ Marinetti, of course, continued to publish articles, letters, and editorials in many of them, but he was not principally involved with their production. As pointed out earlier, Gramsci interpreted this widespread diffusion as the surest sign of Futurism’s decline, but when you consider the overall number against the previous decade, almost half of it interrupted by the war, something else gets revealed: a movement picking up momentum, resulting in the formation of a communications system that is beginning to run on its own. Since I began this chapter by divulging the number of Futurist magazines, this should come as no surprise. The number of these titles had to jump up sometime if we ever wanted to explain how the number could exceed one hundred.

Well, no, they did not. The Futurist movement, I’ve been arguing so far, was a living organism that took shape gradually over time, so that something like an increase or decrease in the number of magazine titles per year or decade has the potential to tell us something valuable about how the movement was evolving. In this instance, what we observe is a new configuration of the movement. What we have, in effect, is a Futurism out of control. Titles get produced all over Italy, but they are in no way bound by the directives of a main station. And this is quite different from what was happening in the teens, when Marinetti was actively pulling strings from behind the scenes. A turn toward theater (and a revival of the serate futuriste), the relocation to Rome in 1922 to follow Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista, a busy international schedule filled with conferences, exhibits, talks, travel (western Europe, Latin America, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, and Portugal), and a renewed interest in the books printed by his Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’ (fourteen between 1920 and 1930) are some of the circumstances that help explain Marinetti’s distraction. But whatever the reason(s), the truth is that Futurist magazines were more or less running on their own, coming out as much from the student groups and provincial branches of the movement as from enterprising members eager to print something on their own.

6.11 Riviste Futuriste, 1920-1929.

So what, then, does this jump in magazine production have to do with the wireless? In basic terms, the magazine was a technology through which individuals and groups could send and receive messages. Marinetti had moved away from a unidirectional broadcast model like Poesia, preferring instead to allow for more unregulated proliferation, but in doing so, he avoided using a model that would be heavily dependent on distribution for its effects, letting production itself become a method for generating chatter, on the one hand, and for allowing the participation of a wide range of individuals and groups sympathetic with the Futurist cause, on the other. In many ways, it is the Futurist as producer plan, one in which the act of working within the medium itself was already part of the message. In the 1920s, more magazines mean more coverage, and what Marinetti sanctions here is the practice of establishing as many transmitters as possible. In the absence of more intense regulation from headquarters, the movement gets defined by a new strategy for communication, one in which the possibility for two-way transmissions does not depend on Rome or Milan for the mediation. Marinetti’s laissez-faire approach during the 1920s has been interpreted as a letting go, and that, I think, is largely true. But it was done, in part, because he was both inspiring new recruits, i giovani, and looking to embed Futurism more deeply into a modern Italian culture that was continuing to take shape alongside the increased popularity of Mussolini’s Fascist Party. It should be noted as well that during this particular decade, cultural production through the press was still not as tightly controlled as it was in the mid-1930s, when the Ministry of Popular Culture began to monitor all of the media within Italy more closely.

In 1925, the editors of the Trieste-based Futurist magazine 25 put it this way: “Each new creator is a new bridge leading the way through the infinite possibilities of our time. Whoever creates defines a movement. Movement=Experience.”⁴⁵ Bringing out a magazine in Milan a year later, the Milanese Futurist Group decided that the antenna was the most appropriate analogy for describing this process, using it as their title and including a note on the masthead explaining, “L’antenna picks up and transmits the brainwaves of all ultradynamic creators. A power plant—located next to our station—burns all the stick-in-the-mud pumpkin heads.”⁴⁶ As part of the gimmick, they even included a radio-diffusione estera section in the first issue with simulated broadcasts from New York (Rosamond Botsford), Holland (Theo van Doesburg), Belgium (Georges Linze, editor of L’anthologie), and Romania (Mihail Ernest Cosma, editor of Integral), and it was followed by a section for circuiti radio-elettrici and radionotizie, including details about Futurist events. What’s so striking about these efforts in the 1920s is the recognition that Futurism was still behind the times. Creation in print was certainly helping to define the movement, but a magazine like L’antenna was one example of how it was still unable to move beyond print into something like a real radio transmission where the news could be heard and not seen. Marinetti, as I explain shortly, eventually got his chance to stand at the microphone; but in the 1920s, this is never a viable option, and there is a sense in which the magazine itself becomes a necessary substitute, biding time until other technological possibilities open up.

In the 1930s, and largely in an effort to prepare Futurism for a Fascist future while simultaneously staving off detractors eager to frame Futurism as a factory for the production of degenerate art, Marinetti reasserts control. Interestingly, though, he refuses to take on the role as primary editor for any magazine, preferring instead to remain in the foxhole, as Salaris puts it, staging attacks while his friends assume the editorial duties (figure 6.12).⁴⁷ This foxhole tactic may have allowed Marinetti to maximize his influence, but it was also a way to advertise the fact that Futurism had moved far beyond the man and was part of a generational shift that was very much in progress for the masses. Oggi e domani (1930-1932), Dinamo futurista (1933), Futurismo (1932-1933) / Sant’Elia (19331934) / Artecrazia (first a supplement in Futurismo and then brought out irregularly on its own between 1934 and 1939), Stile futurista (1934-1935), and Mediterraneo futurista (1938-1943) were the “official” hubs, all of them set up to regulate the Futurist message and, in doing so, to continue selling the idea that this movement was the most legitimate expression of modern art and life within an Italian cultural landscape that was becoming increasingly repressive. During this decade, thirty-four magazines popped up across Italy, but if you take a closer look, you realize in fact that the number was actually much smaller: seven titles were “official,” two of them were designed as propaganda for the war in Ethiopia (Affrica and Azione imperiale), and four of them belonged to Futurist splinter groups (Battaglie, Prima linea, Nuovo futurismo, and Supremazia futurista), leaving seventeen or so to account for, ten of them single issues.

6.12 Riviste Futuriste, 1930-1944.

In the 1930s, the Futurist movement embedded itself even more aggressively in an increasingly hypernationalized Italian culture. Indeed, international engagement was still a goal, but the movement was intent on proving its worth at home to the Fascist regime. Part of the response involved coordinating print channels so that the movement could ensure that the message was not getting lost in transmission. The early 1930s was also a period in which Futurist experiments with radio began to take off, and there is a recognition that print, vis-à-vis riviste, could be organized to simulate a radio broadcast. I mentioned earlier that the closing down of Poesia in 1909 represented a decisive break with a broadcast model that was necessary at first for the foundation of the movement, and it led to the point-to-point distribution resembling wireless transmissions. When it returns as a distribution model in the 1930s, however, there is a difference. The concept of broadcasting belongs to the medium of radio, and print itself adapts once again, first to maintain the relevance of the medium and then to justify the relevance of the movement when access to the radio, and other mass media, was extremely limited.⁴⁸ “Radio,” Bertolt Brecht may have been complaining at the same time, “is one sided when it should be two,” but for Marinetti, that turned out to be a benefit.⁴⁹

Futurists were captivated by radio. In addition to producing radio comedies, they wrote manifestos on the subject; conducted live broadcasts (in ten-minute segments); painted and photographed antennas, receivers, amplifiers, coils, and other radio equipment; and designed sound experiments, many of them left unperformed.⁵⁰ The radio, they came to believe, had the power to inspire an art that would be “totally and completely futurist” (totalmente e nettamente futurista). Some Futurist experiments with this “radiarte,” as they called it, were more successful than others, but in every case, they were part of an ongoing engagement with this new medium and an intense fascination with its power to reach people across vast distances.

The Futurist turn toward radio was officially announced in the publication of Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La radia: Manifesto futurista, which appeared in the Gazzetta del popolo (September 22, 1933) and was republished a week later in Futurismo under the title Manifesto della radio. La radia was as much a document reflecting on radio’s early years as it was a rallying cry for its mobilization as the Futurist technology. By using radia instead of radio, Marinetti and Masnata emphasized its place as a legitimate medium in the history of art, one that belonged alongside scultura, pittura, architettura, and poesia. Already by the 1930s, they were bored stiff by the way that broadcasting companies used the radio as a garbage bin for other content. News was delivered on the air, old plays were performed, and stories were read out loud from within the space of a closed studio. The radio, in other words, was made to seem as if it had nothing of its own to contribute. If it was ever going to become fully modern, then medium-specific works of art had to be made, and “radiofonia,” Marinetti and Masnata observed in their manifesto, “was destined to increase a hundredfold the creative genius of the Italian race, abolishing the ancient torturous nostalgia for distance and imposing everywhere parole in libertà as its logical and natural form of expression.”⁵¹

In 1913, Marinetti already had some idea that wireless would shrink the globe, but he could never have foreseen just how drastic the effect would be. With the arrival of radio broadcasting, it was possible for an individual to be in Rome while listening to a live concert in Seville, and “this phenomenon,” as Masnata explains in an unpublished essay on the subject, “of feeling, of being, in two places so far away from each other at the same time, could never have been dreamed before the invention of radio.”⁵² For some of Marinetti’s more innovative experiments, he planned to capitalize on this abolition of distance and the simultaneity in time. His unperformed “Dramma di distanze” (Drama of distances), for instance, sketches out a seventy-seven-second radio broadcast that begins with sounds of a military march in Rome before moving on to tango in Santos, religious music in Tokyo, rustic dance in Varese, a boxing match in New York City, street music in Milan, and a Neapolitan love song played at the Copa Cabana hotel in Rio de Janeiro. It’s unclear exactly how Marinetti wanted this “drama” staged: it could have been a series of prerecorded sound clips strung together one after the other, but considering Marinetti’s intense passion for live performance, it’s more likely that he was imagining something like a global simulcast with several stations in different places synced together.⁵³

Sound experiments were one way to realize this dream of a “radiarte,” but there was more to it. If you wanted to sound like a Futurist on the radio, then you also had to speak like one. For that, Marinetti already had his solution: parole in libertà. It was an older invention, of course, and for two decades, Futurist poets adapted it for poems that would get printed on paper. But printed poems, even with their typographical innovations and onomatopoeic images, had a way of slowing down the transmission since readers would never be able to process the information all at once. With radio, words could travel farther and faster and be heard by listeners almost as quickly as they left the poet’s mouth. For Marinetti, it was only appropriate that this “fast freeword style” (veloce stile parolibero) be used in Mussolini’s Italy, a country, he boasted, “that at 700 kilometers per hour has the record for pure speed” (che detiene a 700 km. all’ora il record della velocità pura).

Parole in libertà and radio: it was an ideal match, another instance when medium and style could fuse together perfectly.⁵⁴ Radio could reinvigorate the worn-out word by freeing it from the visual realm altogether, emphasizing sound above all and becoming, through the transmission, another mode of artistic expression bound up with static, interference, silence, and background noise. And in Marinetti’s mind, parole in libertà was not for poets only: it had the potential to become the preferred style for anyone standing at the microphone. The “radiasta” might never see his audience, but he could speak to it directly, avoiding many of the rhetorical traps reserved for other forms of written and spoken communication. With the allotted ten-minute segments, time was not to be wasted, and this “veloce stile parolibero” would accelerate the delivery of the message, allowing for that magical synthesis between speaker and listener who would not need to waste words when communicating.

But whatever dreams the Futurists may have had for radio broadcasting, it was the stringent governmental regulations in Mussolini’s Italy that eventually kept them from staging any full-scale coup of the airwaves. Günter Berghaus has documented Marinetti’s antagonistic relationship with Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiophoniche (EIAR) throughout the 1930s.⁵⁵ The Fascist government monitored Marinetti’s activities closely the entire time, and members of the station were infuriated by his refusal to submit finished scripts beforehand or refrain from improvisation during the broadcasts. After Alessandro Pavolini took over as minister of popular culture in 1939, things became even more difficult, and Marinetti was constantly vying to keep his slot open even when he was repeatedly informed that his broadcasts were alienating a mass audience that didn’t care any longer for Futurist art. There were other restrictions as well, which, as Margaret Fisher explains, had more to do with the limits of the medium than Mussolini: “There were no opportunities to hold the kind of event in which the Futurists excelled—a full theatrical soirée (serata). Broadcast slots for talks on the arts were ten minutes at most, individual pieces of music often shorter than five minutes. Projecting a Futurist voice or style through radio’s bustling sound factory was difficult at best.”⁵⁶ A complete list of Futurist radio broadcasts has yet to be compiled, but Fisher has documented Marinetti’s own ten-minute broadcasts throughout the 1930s, which were organized under the rubric “World Futurism” (Futurismo mondiale). With an average of about ten broadcasts a year between 1932 and 1943, and factoring in the occasional radio drama of Marinetti and Masnata and the radiophonic lyrics of Fortunato Depero, it would be misleading indeed to confuse the rise of a Fascist-regulated Radio Italia with the failed dreams of Marinetti’s Radia futurista.

It goes without saying that the Futurists had better luck with their magazines during this decade. More than thirty titles appeared between 1930 and 1940, as I mentioned, with an official magazine based in Rome every year to lend support. And many of the Futurist magazines needed it since the movement was getting more forcefully reimagined as the literary-artistic branch of the Fascist Party. With a few exceptions, the rogue student magazines of the 1920s were a thing of the past, and as the movement continued to fall in step, there was less room within Italy for the kind of spontaneity of that earlier moment. Seen from another angle, the number of Futurist magazines printed in the 1930s is deceptive. Instead of representing a proliferation of individualized point-to-point messages for each city, town, and region, as it once did, these magazines were set up as relay stations, with the official titles functioning like transmitters distributing a unified message without worrying, or even waiting, for a reply.

In an interesting twist, then, the Futurist magazine network of the 1930s assumed the one-way distribution model identified with the radio broadcast. If the wireless technology once promised a more democratic mode of communication, it ended up all too quickly under government control that could easily limit access and diffusion. And there’s a valuable lesson here in the history of the little magazine: Marinetti may have wanted to centralize Futurism, but it could only be done through the DIY freedom enabled by this medium. That, in effect, is one of the ways that wireless telegraphy continued to assert its influence. Long after ceasing to exist as the most modern communications technology, it continued to represent one more possibility in a wireless age, one that involved print but not wires.

McLuhan was convinced that wireless telegraphy would put an end to typographic man. Why, after all, would anyone want to print words when they could be transmitted invisibly through sound? And yet the various configurations of the Futurist movement demonstrate that the situation was much more complicated when these two technologies first collided. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Futurists saw the magazine as a place where the wireless could thrive. Instead of disappearing, print was being reimagined on the page and in relation to a network that could exist without ever being seen. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, avant-gardists far and wide tried to imagine a completely wireless world. Karel Teige, the editor of ReD (Prague), predicted the arrival of a portable TSF station (which we now call the cellular phone); Marinetti fantasized about wireless men and women who could communicate their emotions through radio waves; and Velimir Khlebnikov, who worked as a night watchman for the Russian Telegraph Agency, saw a day when radio waves could be projected onto “the dark pages of enormous books, higher than houses, that stand in the center of each town, turning their own pages.”⁵⁷

In these futuristic fantasies, wireless can do many things, but it does not announce the end of print. Writing a few decades later, that’s exactly what happened when the book historian Lucien Febvre tried to peer into a wireless future. For him, it was entirely possible that the day would come when “ideas could get transmitted without passing through the medium of print,” ushering in a postprint generation in which all the codex-inspired technologies would go the way of the dinosaur.⁵⁸ With so many digital devices available today, it’s safe to say that the age of the wireless magazine has arrived, but in continuing to think about this dynamic relationship between print and nonprint media, we can learn a lot from the Futurists. They understood, above all, that the arrival of wireless didn’t mean that the magazine had to die or print had to disappear. Quite the opposite, in fact, was true. Wireless reinvigorated the way print could be imagined on the page, and it shaped how the technology of the magazine could be mobilized to unite (and, at times, disperse) individuals scattered across countries and continents. In the process, wireless modernized the avant-garde magazine by fundamentally changing how artists and writers could even begin to imagine the possibilities of global communication. And that, of course, was at a time in the history of media when plugging into the network could still be done without using any plugs at all.