Introduction

Complex Adaptive Systems

In the context of computer science, a complex adaptive system suggests a system that is neither simple nor strictly linear, much like scapes and assemblages. John H. Holland distinguishes complex adaptive systems as involving a “great number of parts undergoing a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous interactions” and sharing characteristics of “evolution, aggregate behavior, and anticipation” (1992, 19). Complex adaptive systems learn and change accordingly, behaviors emerging from the interactions between a system’s components but also from contextual knowledge from which the agents within the system can theorize rules and anticipate consequences. The generation of such rules, Holland emphasizes, is not centralized but distributed, allowing for greater flexibility in adaptations and resulting in more intricate emergent behaviors.

The phenomenon of emergence is one that I find especially relevant to understanding the systemic nature of radio. In the context of complex adaptive systems, Holland writes that emergence is key to examining the human experience in depth, that it is marked by a “sense of much coming from little” and is “a ubiquitous feature of the world around us [and involved in] human creative activity” (1998, 2). Further, he explains, it “occurs only when the activities of the parts do not simply sum to give activity of the whole. For emergence, the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts” (14). This emergent quality is also characteristic of scapes and assemblages. In the case of WFHB, emergence can occur on and off the air on many scales. Political tensions, technical difficulties, and unexpected events spur on station personnel to make quick decisions that shape the radio experience on both sides of the broadcast. Surprise is inevitable at WFHB. I find complex adaptive systems and complexity theory to be extremely useful in their openness to theorizing the importance of the unexpected.

Framings of the unexpected tend to vary in different works of complexity theory. Sidney Dekker writes that per complexity theory, accidents emerge from “relationships, even from perfectly ‘normal’ relationships, where nothing (not even a part) is broken” (2011, 128). Rather than looking at pieces as separate in their functional success or failure, he finds complexity theory to be a more productive approach for design (writ broadly), allowing for the careful analysis of “component interactions that are non-linear, unfamiliar, unexpected or unplanned, and either not visible or not immediately comprehensible for people running the system” (2011, 128). Accidents, failures, and malfunctions comprise a reasonable vocabulary for Dekker’s work, which counts among its case studies the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261, and several other lethal incidents that he attributes to cascading failure worth examination through complexity and systems thinking. In these high-stakes situations, proper application of complexity theory could, per Dekker, be a matter of life and death.

Under less dire circumstances, complexity theory allows for the perception of the unexpected as positively intriguing and even desirable. David Borgo uses complexity to discuss improvisation in jazz music as “inherently unpredictable—excitingly so—but it is not random. It coheres into emergent patterns that can be sensed by participants, even as each occurrence is decidedly unique” (2022, xxiii). He intends to intervene against the pejorative dismissal of jazz as chaos. Indeed, a skilled jazz ensemble makes for an especially diverting example of a complex adaptive system: dynamic, highly interconnected, and dependent on the relationships between each performer. Borgo emphasizes the particular importance of the unexpected to live performance, writing that “as a temporal art that invokes and plays with memory, identity, and emotion in countless ways, musicking hinges on individual experience and cultural understandings and exploits both our sense of familiarity and surprise” (8). There are many assemblages at play in this notion: memory, identity, emotion, individual experience, culture, performance. The complex adaptive systems framework opens up channels of inquiry into how these assemblages change each other in live performance contexts and to what ends.

Accidents and improvisations of various stakes emerge in community radio, often sonically, as important parts of its complex system of elements and practices. Throughout this dissertation, I look for a balance between romanticizing and demonizing them, understanding through complexity-inflected thought that the unexpected can lead to success, failure, and many other outcomes in between. It is worth understanding the relations that produce and receive such phenomena as emerging from and shaping the radioscape. Doing so highlights the large-scale importance of taking care when participating in and witnessing interactions in the community radio context. At WFHB, many encounters are overtly aural, rather than being hidden by practices enforcing sonic uniformity. Others, like those that take place between listeners and broadcasters, are inaudible. All are nonetheless interconnected in effect.