Broadcasting and time

This thesis brings together work I have published in the last five years in academic journals and edited book collections. All the material presented in the thesis, much of it substantially rewritten, will appear in the trilogy I have been working on since my last published book, Radio, Television and Modern Life (Blackwell 1996). The organising structure of the thesis and its substantive concerns corresponds with that of the three books that will come out of it. The form and content of the thesis, and its relation to the books, is discussed in some detail in its introduction. Its fundamental concern is with human time which I have explored in all my writings since I began research thirty years ago, with my late friend and colleague David Cardiff, into the early history of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The medium of radio is time. Historiography deals with past time. The academic work of writing history on the other, and the temporality of radio and television on the one hand, are the first two themes of this thesis which shows that the orders of time in which they work are divergent rather than convergent. The third section of the thesis attempts their reconciliation through the recovery of meaningful time

Music, radio and the record business in Zimbabwe today

Radio and the recording business have, since the beginning of the last century, had a profound impact upon existing musical life whenever and wherever they have decisively and irreversibly established themselves. Their arrival restructures and redefines the social relations of music in many aspects of its production, performance and reception. Radio and recording technologies have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of all those who one way or another try to make a living from music (composers, performers and - in Europe - publishers, for instance). Performance itself is transformed as new norms are set in place which call for new levels of technique and interpretation. Finally the conditions of musical reception are reconfigured and new `taste publics' emerge, potentially in conflict with each other, as musical life is totalised into a new and complex unity

New perspectives on self-linking

We initiate the study of classical knots through the homotopy class of the n-th evaluation map of the knot, which is the induced map on the compactified n-point configuration space. Sending a knot to its n-th evaluation map realizes the space of knots as a subspace of what we call the n-th mapping space model for knots. We compute the homotopy types of the first three mapping space models, showing that the third model gives rise to an integer-valued invariant. We realize this invariant in two ways, in terms of collinearities of three or four points on the knot, and give some explicit computations. We show this invariant coincides with the second coefficient of the Conway polynomial, thus giving a new geometric definition of the simplest finite-type invariant. Finally, using this geometric definition, we give some new applications of this invariant relating to quadrisecants in the knot and to complexity of polygonal and polynomial realizations of a knot.Comment: 26 pages, 17 figure