Conclusions: the perpetual work to make radio work

2.7.2Challenge and contingency

At every step of the way, unfavourable conditions - contingencies must be overcome. These contingencies are a sine-qua-non for the existence of challenge: in their absence, the motivation for amateur radio work would not exist. Contingencies take various forms: from the clumsiness of drunks, to the mysteries of propagation, from the hour of day and the phase of the moon to the existence of a remote operator who just happens to listen to the wave. Contingencies are thus inexhaustible, leading to the never-ending appearance of such amateur work. Due to operator’s ever-increasing skill in this infinite quest, contingencies are actionable, addressable by the member.

New ‘spaces of contingency’ can be opened at any time by trying fundamentally novel approaches such as new connection modes. Sub-communities form naturally in such spaces, providing for a natural management of a world-wide community.

Contingencies of amateur radio work thus confer an intrinsic durability to the community, by providing intrinsic motivation to the individual member to work as a radio amateur. Csickszentmihalyi (1990) would see these contingencies as forming the “challenge that requires skill” that he proposes as the main precondition for the “optimal experience”. However, this would not be enough for the Hams to be an enduring community. Radio challenge addressing is fundamentally cooperative. A connection is a cooperative achievement and then thanks are in order at the end of the connection. Cooperation is also evident in radio clubs when building and maintaining common equipment, or when operators are visiting each other.

Another difference from Csickszentmihalyi’s notion of individual challenge is that challenges must be collaboratively constructed, shared and maintained by members for such challenges to be the basis of community endurance: individuals must see the same kinds of contingencies as challenging. The radio connection enables members who share the same challenge to find each other, bringing (gratis) a network of contacts, who may be valuable resources of know-how on radio affairs and other kinds of communitarian help. Besides the radio connection, the radio clubs and federations are also venues of finding people who take pride in addressing the same challenge and getting suggestions for new related challenges. Such venues provide well-known entry points for beginners to find peers to share challenges with and learn from. The informal aspects usually associated with the word ‘community’ must not let us ignore the formal organisation of Ham and its roles, from sharing challenge to QSL dissemination.

The ability with which a member has addressed challenge along the years will of course bring prestige to that person. Stories about oneself and about others are often told, and learned from (e.g. getting from X to Y with N Watt, by using Z configured in the W working way). One’s achievements and the stories describing them are forming one’s prestige and are always strongly attached to one’s call sign in a similar manner with the “playing level” prestige in MUDs (Muramatsu and Ackerman 1998).

Orr (1996) emphasized the importance of “war stories” for membership and learning in a community of xerographic machines repair technicians (reps). Such stories are even more important in amateur radio, as a ‘good story to tell’ (to the ‘audience’, see below) at the end of challenge addressing is an integral part of the motivation for amateur work. It would not be very wrong to say that radio amateurs are continuously addressing radio contingencies ‘for a story to tell’.

2.7.3Research and pioneering. Audiences of beneficiaries. Peer review

Radically new approaches make one be a pioneer, opening the ways for even larger audiences of beneficiaries. This ‘audience effect’ becomes even more pronounced when the beneficiary is the world-at-large, by the creation or improvement of new radio standards (e.g. wavebands), or by helping in emergency situations using the unequalled communication autonomy conferred by the Ham transceiver. Members praising other’s stories, or generic statements like “we always had a research value” suggest that, even if one has never contributed to the world at large, knowing that the community as a whole developed, at some point, a radio approach that is now in public use, knowing that a peer has helped the rapid procurement of a drug from abroad for an urgent case, knowing that it can happen one day to oneself, is reason enough to provide audience-related motivation for amateur work.

The analogy with research (for the community and for the public) gives us the opportunity to reflect on the review process that takes place inside the community. Ideas are sanctioned before dissemination in conventional ways (e.g. review before publishing in a magazine) or in Ham-specific ways: efficiency of an equipment improvement can be tested through radio connection, while a brand new challenge proposed for sharing (e.g. EME) is left naturally for the other members to find interesting and choose to attempt its addressing, or find it un-interesting and choose not to address it.

2.7.4Graceful learning. Canonical descriptions of amateur practice

We have seen the role of stories in learning, as also suggested by Orr. As in Orr’s setting and in many other settings, subtleties of non-canonical practice (cf. Brown and Duguid 1991) such as exceptions from the codes of rules and regulations or exceptions from the codes returned by a copy machine are learned through participation (cf. Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998). However, the reasons for practice being described in canonical ways in industrial settings are different from the canonical descriptions of practice in settings like amateur radio. Canonical descriptions in employment settings can be thought to represent a contract between the employer and the employee. This is obviously not the case in the amateur setting: the code of rules and regulations was developed from within radio practice, in response to limitations of the radio medium (e.g. intrinsic lack of information about who is just communicating). It later turned into internationally-accepted rules, to which most national rules comply.

While such canonical descriptions of practice can be learned informally (and indeed, regular listening-in to the wave helps their learning), one should not underestimate the role of explicit learning, e.g. in formal lectures at radio clubs, teaching simple schematics and Morse code. Although the notion of community and the theory of Community of Practice suggest informal learning, formal learning and examination still have their place in amateur radio.

2.7.5The publics and the professionals

In the next chapter, we will encounter amateurs that have a different relationship with their professional counterparts and the public at large. The chapter, as well as the rest of the thesis, will re-visit the themes that we developed when studying amateur radio work and technology: challenge, contingency, research, pioneering, learning the amateur practice, the relationship with professional counterparts and the public.

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