Chapter 2 A Field Study of Amateur Radio work

Chapter 2
A Field Study of Amateur Radio work

2.1Introduction

This chapter will introduce Amateur Radio, a worldwide community using radio for their communication, and having radio as their main interest. Few studies of Amateur Radio operators (Hams) could be found, in different fields such as the history of communication (Douglas 1987), or linguistics (e.g. Gibbon 1981, 1985). Along with Ham-specific technological discussions, a number of historical retrospectives could be found in magazines and websites published by the community itself.

The main concern of this chapter is community endurance, the aspects that enable the community to thrive over a long period. Ultimately, endurance is an important component of the community “success”. This area has not been directly addressed in the CSCW and CMC literature, but there exists a fair amount of related work. Mynatt et al. (1998) suggest that a network community should offer a “range” of possibilities for its members to address during their membership. They also suggest the importance of considering both the “real” and the “virtual” sides of a community in assessing and designing for community endurance. Their suggestions are based on experiences with MUDs and Media Spaces, which they bind together under the archetype they call “network community”.

However, such cookbooks of design implications cannot guarantee that a community will thrive. The member motivation to participate in a community and to contribute to its ‘public good’ is important for community endurance. In their studies of the usenet, Kollock and Smith (1996, Kollock 1999) have been concerned with the pragmatic advantages one derives from being member in a community, and used sociological (Ostrom 1990) and mathematical (Axelrod 1984) theories of cooperation while investigating this question. Along the same lines, Rheingold (1993) sees the cooperation in the WELL virtual community as a “gift economy” (page 56).

More recently, Carroll and Rosson (2001) ask for more numerous and detailed evaluations of community networks, since existing evaluations (e.g. Kraut et al. 1996) do not show an increased socialisation and strong ties among their subscribers, thus the virtual community endurance is likely to be low. This comes in contradiction with suggestions made by classical virtual community literature (e.g. Rheingold 1993), considered “anecdotal” by Carroll and Rosson (page 374). In other words, although the community network gets ‘wired’, there is a risk that nothing much will happen apart from “better home shopping” as their title implies. If communities that share a physical location (community networks) are found inefficient on methodical evaluation, one could reason that geographically distributed communities are even more at risk.

How are we to go about studying community endurance? One can do that without assuming community “success” through an ideal proposed by a theory, be it mathematical or sociological, or by a democratic “participation” principle. Instead, one could follow the members of a well-established, globally distributed community and the practices they engage in, and see what, for them, constitutes appropriate participation, appropriate contribution, suitable help from technology and ultimately community endurance and success. This chapter will describe such a study, carried out in the Amateur Radio community. Although they are not a computer-mediated community, the interest in studying them is fuelled by many features that are relevant for our community endurance concern, as well as for other concerns specific to this thesis.

One immediately apparent feature of the Ham radio is its interest for communication, long before the Internet age. Studying how such communication and social interaction take place in this specific community, on its specific medium –radio- can help us better understand technology-mediated community activity. The geographical distribution of the amateur radio community is world-wide, again, long before the Internet has facilitated the formation of other globally-spread communities. The field study attempts to learn more on how such distribution is managed by the community. The first amateur radio enthusiasts started to transmit and tune in to radio waves almost a hundred years ago. Since then, the community has grown and continued its activity despite legal changes in administering the radio wave spectrum, or the exponential growth of the Internet. The field study seeks to understand the ingredients of such a remarkable endurance, that many net communities would aspire to. Amateur radio is hence taken here as a perspicuous instance of a well-established, long-lived geographically distributed, technology-centred and technology-mediated amateur community.

This chapter is organised as follows. First the methods and the field setting are introduced and discussed. Since talk is of central importance in the community, we will examine in detail a radio connection. After that, an interim discussion will be made on how the nature of the radio medium affects communication and cooperation. One of the results of this analysis is that we cannot treat the radio medium in isolation, indeed a skilful combination of media is used by the members to accomplish their goals. The member goals and motivations are addressed in detail in the next section, that looks at different forms of amateur radio work. The basic view of community endurance develops, based on the observation that members prefer, in various ways, to ‘live on the edge’ in radio-related matters, i.e. to explore the possibility of realising radio connections in conditions that are not totally favourable. To get inspiration for design in such settings, these results are then used to examine the rationale of specific tools and technologies developed by radio amateurs in their activity. The chapter ends with a round-up discussion that considers the basic features identified as relevant for community endurance and amateur work, which will be developed in subsequent chapters.