I regard it as a blessing that gives me some perspective remembering a time before both the Internet and cell phones.

But my late father remembered a time before radio. He was four when WWJ launched in Detroit. But when he was six a second station WJR came on the air and his father brought home a radio. It was a source of endless fascination to the entire family whether they were listening to their beloved Detroit Tigers, a concert or the news. Before radio there was no concept of news in real time. People had both a morning and an evening newspaper if they were news junkies. But radio could broadcast news as it happened.

Then there was television. My father was leaving a sales call in Ann Arbor and spied a crowd gathered around a storefront. As he got closer there was a TV in the window and there were the Detroit Tigers playing the Milwaukee Brewers. He told me it was radio with pictures. He couldn't afford a television but when I was born a few years later they went out and purchased a TV so that I could grow up with it just like they grew up with radio. Just like the Internet they had such high hopes for the medium, more high brow than radio but it wasn't to be.

Has there been a more powerful vehicle for projection of 'soft power' than the BBC?

100 years of programming, pulsing out the British perspective for a world that was hungry for new sources of media.

Leaked documents from the CISA recently revealed operations to shape the 'cognitive infrastructure', by planting agents into moderation and product roles in online platforms - they have nothing on Brits, who have been showing the US how it is done for decades

Interesting little-known fact:

"The BBC that began broadcasting at 6pm on 14 November 1922 was not the British Broadcasting Corporation of today. It was in fact the British Broadcasting Company and was made up of separate stations around the country operated by different companies."

Some interesting background about the start of the BBC here:

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/2lo-cal...

Should the title not read, "BBC marks centenary of its first radio broadcast"?

Other entities had been broadcasting for many years before the BBC's services began.