- Email: [email protected]
Introduction: Critical reflections on technological convergence on radio and the emerging digital cultures and practices
Telematics and Informatics 30 (2013) 211–213
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Telematics and Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele
Introduction: Critical reflections on technological convergence on radio and the emerging digital cultures and practices
1. Introduction The Internet and mobile phones are changing the face of radio. Their appropriation by private, public and community radio is transforming radio as a medium thus making it at least in principle more accessible through multiple platforms such as webcasting, mobile streaming, blogging, podcasts, and indeed social media. In principle, these technologies have had a profound impact on radio’s institutional practices and cultures especially with regards to the way it produces and disseminates content. Digital platforms directly and indirectly influence radio’s practices in terms of the production, dissemination, and subsequent consumption of radio content. Radio publics are in principle also increasingly involved in the production of news because of the proliferation of informal spaces of production. However, as most authors in this Issue show any meaningful critique of the emerging digital cultures and practices on radio must always be grounded on the social, political, and economic contexts that acknowledge the social shaping of the new technologies used by radio journalists. Technologies are always socially and historically contingent and their agency invariably tied to organisational and institutional conditions in which they are deployed. Hence, this Special Issue critically reflects on emerging digital cultures on radio in various geographic areas that provide variegated social, political, and economic conditions. The Issue critically examines the uptake and use of the new online and mobile digital media platforms by radio stations of diverse orientation and the potential such platforms have to open-up and democratise radio as an institution and extend spaces of audience interaction or even participation. The Issue boasts articles from many diverse regions and authors engage with the question of digital practices and cultures within different radio organisational and institutional orders that offer varying technological, political, legal and regulatory regimes that underpin radio’s convergence with the new digital platforms.1 2. Ways of thinking radio convergence History shows that the emergence of all new media has often been accompanied by either some exaggerated celebration or fatalistic pessimism about their impact on society and its institutions (Winston, 1998). For example, the advent of the Internet and mobile phones is often characterized as either radically changing how we communicate or simply as yet another manifestation of the mutating power of capital now riding on the seductive myth of the new. Similarly, the convergence of these technologies with ‘old media’ like radio is often interpreted within these two seemingly radical and incommensurable perspectives. Utopian views on media technologies are largely informed by instrumentalist and deterministic perceptions of the impact of new media (itself always a relative term) on media institutions and society, while the dystopian perspectives are also predicated on a very cynical view of the relative autonomy of technologies and human agency from what they often construct as the rigid and immutable overarching structures or conditions. Technologies are simply regarded as ideology in material form and their only logical impact is that of subordination and domination on behalf of the business or political elite. The problem with these two schools of thought is that they obviously lack sophistication in grappling with the complex question of the dialectical relationship between technology, agency and structure. They both represent the same side of the coin, that is, the universality, linearity, and predictability of technological impact on society and institutions in spite of the differences. As Hayse Mabweazara, Rey Rosales and others in this Issue sufficiently demonstrate, the impact of digital media 1 The guest editor would like to acknowledge the research grant support he received from Carleton University in Canada. This funding was important in conducting field work.
0736-5853/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2012.10.005
212
Editorial / Telematics and Informatics 30 (2013) 211–213
on radio and its publics is always subject to contextual modeling. According to Mabweazara, while digital media have improved the reception of ‘pirate radio’ by audiences in Zimbabwe, traditional radio still remains central to audience reception. Mabweazara’s article provides a useful critique of the cyber optimists’ apocalyptic predictions of the demise of radio due to new media technologies. Consequently, the deficiency of the utopian and dystopian views inevitably call for a third theoretical perspective which, following Feenberg (1999), I have referred to as the Critical theory of convergence. While constructivist in approach, this view remains ‘Critical’ in the Marxian sense because it perceives the questions of ideology and hegemony as tightly interwoven with new media and their platforms that are increasingly part of traditional radio through convergence. However, while acknowledging the role of power in shaping the deployment of technologies in new and old media spaces, this theory also equally engages with the potential power of agency and context in shaping technological outcomes. To that end, digital media technologies can never be perceived as vehicles of domination by the powerful elite by default, but rather as sites of ideological contestation between different classes and interests where the balance of power is constantly shifting like a pendulum. In this theoretical paradigm, technological convergence on radio is therefore seen as at once representing a constraint and a resource depending on agency and the organizational and institutional contexts of radio stations. Radio publics thus have the potential to negotiate convergence on radio to create spaces for feedback, participation, and new civic vernaculars in what can be regarded as a constantly changing terrain of competing interests of radio owners, shareholders, professionals, advertisers, audiences, consumers and citizens. All these conflicting interests find expression through the convergence of new platforms and radio which at once provides modalities for capital mobility and forms of audience interaction with content producers. As I argue in my article, it is important that technological convergence on radio be seen within a context of a broader convergence culture reflecting the strategic alliances in the business of content production and distribution by the media. The diverse interests that find expression through radio convergence as a space and a technology can also hardly be said to be rigid and fixated, but flexible, fluid, and constantly converging and diverging with each other. In this context, the emerging digital cultures on radio reflect the texture of these tensions within which the affordances and agency of new technologies is negotiated. 3. Convergence and its reshaping of radio Based on the articles in this Issue one can make some generalizations about how the convergence of telecommunications, broadcasting, and computing is changing radio as a medium. Across the world, including in some developing countries covered in this Issue, it is clear that radio is increasingly using multiple platforms such as online streaming, mobile streaming, social media (Face book and Twitter), blogs, podcasts, and most importantly text messaging and Frontline SMS. At the level of medium analysis, we are witnessing a change of a medium that was once exclusively associated with the voice (monomodal) to one that is now based on multimedia platforms (multimodal) embracing the voice, written words, pictures, and in some cases even video. For radio practitioners and their audiences, this pluralisation and multiplication of radio spaces has the potential to make radio more accessible, interactive, and participatory although as mentioned earlier, this is always subject to organizational and institutional contexts. In terms of interactivity, radio has always been interactive, but what digital media have done is to make it even much more interactive especially in the sense that the audiences can now independently distribute radio content through, for example, e-mail and other Web 2.0 platforms. They can now attach and forward radio podcasts and visuals amongst themselves. In this sense radio, has shifted from a two-way experience to being a multi-directional communicative experience. Such interactivity has following Lister et al. (2003, p. 20), also brought audiences ‘a more powerful sense of user engagement with. . . [radio]. . .. texts’. Similarly, digital platforms mean that radio is shifting from being a transient medium to a medium audiences can pause, store, retrieve/download and disseminate at their convenience. As Rey Rosales’ article shows much more optimistically, all these changes in interactivity have meant that radio is becoming more accessible in time and place depending on connectivity. In countries with good connectivity, greater accessibility of radio content to audiences means that digitization and convergence are democratizing radio by making it potentially more pervasive within and across social divides. The multiple platforms of websites, social media, podcasts, and mobile streaming are, in principle, making radio vertically and horizontally pervasive within and across social classes. 4. New digital practices and cultures on radio The changes that are taking place on radio cannot be entirely said to be driven by technological convergence on radio. They are also a product of a dialectical process where radio is also creatively tapping into independent mobile and online cultures and practices by audiences. These organic practices by audiences have spawned a digital radio culture of culture of texting. For example, texting and Frontline SMS are a good example of how radio has mainstreamed public mobile cultures in its content production, dissemination, and consumption practices. Bivens (2008, p. 113) sees these practices and technologies as epitomizing how the ‘actions of journalists and the wider public intertwine. . .[and]. . .become influential in the production of mainstream news.’ True enough; as demonstrated by most articles in this Issue, the emerging trend across different countries is that there is a relatively high uptake of the Internet and the mobile phone’s interactive platforms to produce and disseminate news and current affairs content. Sometimes this culminates in the creation of informal production spaces for audiences and the merging of mainstream and citizen journalism on radio. As demonstrated nearly by all contributors to this Issue, most of the radio stations under study here used ‘new media’ in the production and dissemination
213
Editorial / Telematics and Informatics 30 (2013) 211–213
of content, albeit to varying degrees and at various stages of the production chain. For example, the new interactive media platforms have not substituted the traditional forms of news gathering such as telephone calls and face-to-face interviews, but are merely complementing them. At the news room level, text-messaging, e-mail, and social media are used mostly in initial contacts with sources to arrange for face-to-face interviews which are still seen as ethically indispensible in news production. However, the sum total impact of new digital platforms as observed in some articles is the gradual emergence of digital cultures in the production, dissemination, and consumption of content. Digital media also seem to blur and blend these processes especially in live programming where audiences use a panoply of digital networks to engage almost simultaneously with all the three processes. 5. Emerging forms of audience participation Audience participation on radio programmes through new media technologies is still shaped by numerous factors that can be broadly referred to as organizational and institutional modeling. Apart from bigger questions of social orders, this refers largely to questions of ownership and funding of radio and how both have traceable consequences in how citizens can participate on radio using new media technologies. For instance, in privately owned radio stations participation by audiences in news and current affairs programmes was always influenced by the profit-making objective of such stations. While the radio stations allowed audience participation in their current affairs programmes through text messaging, social media, and e-mail, this was always negotiated within the context of the politics of advertising and sponsorships as the life blood of corporate radio. This point is well demonstrated by Wendy Willems who argues that audience participation is framed within a corporate logic of boosting advertising revenue by selling personal data from mobile phones and social media. As I also argue in my article, technological convergence of traditional radio and the new digital media certainly creates forms of audience interaction and/or ‘participation’ on radio, but in a way that dilutes politics with market imperatives. Audiences are free to use the Internet and mobile phones to participate in public debates on radio, but in the process they cannot eschew the hidden hand of the market which recasts them as consumers. Sarah Chiumbu and Dina Ligaga also acknowledge the commercial exigencies on radio, but within a fairly optimistic account that sees ‘new media as expanding communicative radio spaces and transforming the nature of audience engagement’. Gorretti Nassanga and team explore technological convergence within the context of community radio. While they don’t discuss similar pressures caused by donors who mostly provide computers and mobile phones to such stations, their article extensively engages with the problem of the digital divide that affects mostly rural based radio stations in countries they studied. However, as I show elsewhere, donors always provide technological support to community radio which they use as a conditionality for influencing programming. In most cases the mobile phones that they provide are used in programming with a specific focus on issues of interest to donors and not journalists and possibly even communities. In some cases, technological support is also used to leverage donor prescription of self-produced programmes. Thus the donor dollar power and their facilitation for technological diffusion in community radio stations is not always consistent with the professional autonomy of journalists and audience sovereignty on programming. Digital media platforms on radio have certainly led to a demotic turn where people are increasingly visible on radio. However, it’s important to note that audience participation through these so-called technologies of freedom is invitational. It remains subject to the ideological and structural limitations that characterize radio. To that end, the digital and demotic turns on radio must not be seen as synonymous with participation that is transformative and empowering to audiences. References Bivens, R.K., 2008. The internet, mobile phones and blogging. Journalism Pract. 2 (1), 113–129. Feenberg, A., 1999. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K., Grant, I., 2003. New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, London. Winston, N., 1998. Media Technology and Society: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, London.
Last Moyo E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 30 October 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Telematics and Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele
Introduction: Critical reflections on technological convergence on radio and the emerging digital cultures and practices
1. Introduction The Internet and mobile phones are changing the face of radio. Their appropriation by private, public and community radio is transforming radio as a medium thus making it at least in principle more accessible through multiple platforms such as webcasting, mobile streaming, blogging, podcasts, and indeed social media. In principle, these technologies have had a profound impact on radio’s institutional practices and cultures especially with regards to the way it produces and disseminates content. Digital platforms directly and indirectly influence radio’s practices in terms of the production, dissemination, and subsequent consumption of radio content. Radio publics are in principle also increasingly involved in the production of news because of the proliferation of informal spaces of production. However, as most authors in this Issue show any meaningful critique of the emerging digital cultures and practices on radio must always be grounded on the social, political, and economic contexts that acknowledge the social shaping of the new technologies used by radio journalists. Technologies are always socially and historically contingent and their agency invariably tied to organisational and institutional conditions in which they are deployed. Hence, this Special Issue critically reflects on emerging digital cultures on radio in various geographic areas that provide variegated social, political, and economic conditions. The Issue critically examines the uptake and use of the new online and mobile digital media platforms by radio stations of diverse orientation and the potential such platforms have to open-up and democratise radio as an institution and extend spaces of audience interaction or even participation. The Issue boasts articles from many diverse regions and authors engage with the question of digital practices and cultures within different radio organisational and institutional orders that offer varying technological, political, legal and regulatory regimes that underpin radio’s convergence with the new digital platforms.1 2. Ways of thinking radio convergence History shows that the emergence of all new media has often been accompanied by either some exaggerated celebration or fatalistic pessimism about their impact on society and its institutions (Winston, 1998). For example, the advent of the Internet and mobile phones is often characterized as either radically changing how we communicate or simply as yet another manifestation of the mutating power of capital now riding on the seductive myth of the new. Similarly, the convergence of these technologies with ‘old media’ like radio is often interpreted within these two seemingly radical and incommensurable perspectives. Utopian views on media technologies are largely informed by instrumentalist and deterministic perceptions of the impact of new media (itself always a relative term) on media institutions and society, while the dystopian perspectives are also predicated on a very cynical view of the relative autonomy of technologies and human agency from what they often construct as the rigid and immutable overarching structures or conditions. Technologies are simply regarded as ideology in material form and their only logical impact is that of subordination and domination on behalf of the business or political elite. The problem with these two schools of thought is that they obviously lack sophistication in grappling with the complex question of the dialectical relationship between technology, agency and structure. They both represent the same side of the coin, that is, the universality, linearity, and predictability of technological impact on society and institutions in spite of the differences. As Hayse Mabweazara, Rey Rosales and others in this Issue sufficiently demonstrate, the impact of digital media 1 The guest editor would like to acknowledge the research grant support he received from Carleton University in Canada. This funding was important in conducting field work.
0736-5853/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2012.10.005
212
Editorial / Telematics and Informatics 30 (2013) 211–213
on radio and its publics is always subject to contextual modeling. According to Mabweazara, while digital media have improved the reception of ‘pirate radio’ by audiences in Zimbabwe, traditional radio still remains central to audience reception. Mabweazara’s article provides a useful critique of the cyber optimists’ apocalyptic predictions of the demise of radio due to new media technologies. Consequently, the deficiency of the utopian and dystopian views inevitably call for a third theoretical perspective which, following Feenberg (1999), I have referred to as the Critical theory of convergence. While constructivist in approach, this view remains ‘Critical’ in the Marxian sense because it perceives the questions of ideology and hegemony as tightly interwoven with new media and their platforms that are increasingly part of traditional radio through convergence. However, while acknowledging the role of power in shaping the deployment of technologies in new and old media spaces, this theory also equally engages with the potential power of agency and context in shaping technological outcomes. To that end, digital media technologies can never be perceived as vehicles of domination by the powerful elite by default, but rather as sites of ideological contestation between different classes and interests where the balance of power is constantly shifting like a pendulum. In this theoretical paradigm, technological convergence on radio is therefore seen as at once representing a constraint and a resource depending on agency and the organizational and institutional contexts of radio stations. Radio publics thus have the potential to negotiate convergence on radio to create spaces for feedback, participation, and new civic vernaculars in what can be regarded as a constantly changing terrain of competing interests of radio owners, shareholders, professionals, advertisers, audiences, consumers and citizens. All these conflicting interests find expression through the convergence of new platforms and radio which at once provides modalities for capital mobility and forms of audience interaction with content producers. As I argue in my article, it is important that technological convergence on radio be seen within a context of a broader convergence culture reflecting the strategic alliances in the business of content production and distribution by the media. The diverse interests that find expression through radio convergence as a space and a technology can also hardly be said to be rigid and fixated, but flexible, fluid, and constantly converging and diverging with each other. In this context, the emerging digital cultures on radio reflect the texture of these tensions within which the affordances and agency of new technologies is negotiated. 3. Convergence and its reshaping of radio Based on the articles in this Issue one can make some generalizations about how the convergence of telecommunications, broadcasting, and computing is changing radio as a medium. Across the world, including in some developing countries covered in this Issue, it is clear that radio is increasingly using multiple platforms such as online streaming, mobile streaming, social media (Face book and Twitter), blogs, podcasts, and most importantly text messaging and Frontline SMS. At the level of medium analysis, we are witnessing a change of a medium that was once exclusively associated with the voice (monomodal) to one that is now based on multimedia platforms (multimodal) embracing the voice, written words, pictures, and in some cases even video. For radio practitioners and their audiences, this pluralisation and multiplication of radio spaces has the potential to make radio more accessible, interactive, and participatory although as mentioned earlier, this is always subject to organizational and institutional contexts. In terms of interactivity, radio has always been interactive, but what digital media have done is to make it even much more interactive especially in the sense that the audiences can now independently distribute radio content through, for example, e-mail and other Web 2.0 platforms. They can now attach and forward radio podcasts and visuals amongst themselves. In this sense radio, has shifted from a two-way experience to being a multi-directional communicative experience. Such interactivity has following Lister et al. (2003, p. 20), also brought audiences ‘a more powerful sense of user engagement with. . . [radio]. . .. texts’. Similarly, digital platforms mean that radio is shifting from being a transient medium to a medium audiences can pause, store, retrieve/download and disseminate at their convenience. As Rey Rosales’ article shows much more optimistically, all these changes in interactivity have meant that radio is becoming more accessible in time and place depending on connectivity. In countries with good connectivity, greater accessibility of radio content to audiences means that digitization and convergence are democratizing radio by making it potentially more pervasive within and across social divides. The multiple platforms of websites, social media, podcasts, and mobile streaming are, in principle, making radio vertically and horizontally pervasive within and across social classes. 4. New digital practices and cultures on radio The changes that are taking place on radio cannot be entirely said to be driven by technological convergence on radio. They are also a product of a dialectical process where radio is also creatively tapping into independent mobile and online cultures and practices by audiences. These organic practices by audiences have spawned a digital radio culture of culture of texting. For example, texting and Frontline SMS are a good example of how radio has mainstreamed public mobile cultures in its content production, dissemination, and consumption practices. Bivens (2008, p. 113) sees these practices and technologies as epitomizing how the ‘actions of journalists and the wider public intertwine. . .[and]. . .become influential in the production of mainstream news.’ True enough; as demonstrated by most articles in this Issue, the emerging trend across different countries is that there is a relatively high uptake of the Internet and the mobile phone’s interactive platforms to produce and disseminate news and current affairs content. Sometimes this culminates in the creation of informal production spaces for audiences and the merging of mainstream and citizen journalism on radio. As demonstrated nearly by all contributors to this Issue, most of the radio stations under study here used ‘new media’ in the production and dissemination
213
Editorial / Telematics and Informatics 30 (2013) 211–213
of content, albeit to varying degrees and at various stages of the production chain. For example, the new interactive media platforms have not substituted the traditional forms of news gathering such as telephone calls and face-to-face interviews, but are merely complementing them. At the news room level, text-messaging, e-mail, and social media are used mostly in initial contacts with sources to arrange for face-to-face interviews which are still seen as ethically indispensible in news production. However, the sum total impact of new digital platforms as observed in some articles is the gradual emergence of digital cultures in the production, dissemination, and consumption of content. Digital media also seem to blur and blend these processes especially in live programming where audiences use a panoply of digital networks to engage almost simultaneously with all the three processes. 5. Emerging forms of audience participation Audience participation on radio programmes through new media technologies is still shaped by numerous factors that can be broadly referred to as organizational and institutional modeling. Apart from bigger questions of social orders, this refers largely to questions of ownership and funding of radio and how both have traceable consequences in how citizens can participate on radio using new media technologies. For instance, in privately owned radio stations participation by audiences in news and current affairs programmes was always influenced by the profit-making objective of such stations. While the radio stations allowed audience participation in their current affairs programmes through text messaging, social media, and e-mail, this was always negotiated within the context of the politics of advertising and sponsorships as the life blood of corporate radio. This point is well demonstrated by Wendy Willems who argues that audience participation is framed within a corporate logic of boosting advertising revenue by selling personal data from mobile phones and social media. As I also argue in my article, technological convergence of traditional radio and the new digital media certainly creates forms of audience interaction and/or ‘participation’ on radio, but in a way that dilutes politics with market imperatives. Audiences are free to use the Internet and mobile phones to participate in public debates on radio, but in the process they cannot eschew the hidden hand of the market which recasts them as consumers. Sarah Chiumbu and Dina Ligaga also acknowledge the commercial exigencies on radio, but within a fairly optimistic account that sees ‘new media as expanding communicative radio spaces and transforming the nature of audience engagement’. Gorretti Nassanga and team explore technological convergence within the context of community radio. While they don’t discuss similar pressures caused by donors who mostly provide computers and mobile phones to such stations, their article extensively engages with the problem of the digital divide that affects mostly rural based radio stations in countries they studied. However, as I show elsewhere, donors always provide technological support to community radio which they use as a conditionality for influencing programming. In most cases the mobile phones that they provide are used in programming with a specific focus on issues of interest to donors and not journalists and possibly even communities. In some cases, technological support is also used to leverage donor prescription of self-produced programmes. Thus the donor dollar power and their facilitation for technological diffusion in community radio stations is not always consistent with the professional autonomy of journalists and audience sovereignty on programming. Digital media platforms on radio have certainly led to a demotic turn where people are increasingly visible on radio. However, it’s important to note that audience participation through these so-called technologies of freedom is invitational. It remains subject to the ideological and structural limitations that characterize radio. To that end, the digital and demotic turns on radio must not be seen as synonymous with participation that is transformative and empowering to audiences. References Bivens, R.K., 2008. The internet, mobile phones and blogging. Journalism Pract. 2 (1), 113–129. Feenberg, A., 1999. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K., Grant, I., 2003. New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, London. Winston, N., 1998. Media Technology and Society: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, London.
Last Moyo E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 30 October 2012