For those who don’t know, I do a radio show once a week on CKCU, our nation’s oldest and most distinguished campus-based community radio station. It’s funding drive season, and the two hours of begging for money on the air last week got me thinking about the function of community radio – other than satisfying my love to play music, what does the radio station do, and why does it deserve the money it’s asking for? Especially considering the fact that in the shift from more communal modes of organization to more individual ones, radio was one of the first technologies to be absorbed into the Internet? Community radio – defined as radio that’s community based, independent, and participatory – not only incubates and creates opportunity for media talent, artists, and local business but in fact has a critical role in the building of place itself.
In addition to still being the most democratic way to transmit information (at least until access to the Net becomes an inalienable right), people in places like Afghanistan have used radio for its very strong community building functions. It permits feedback and creates the critical collective third place wherein a culture develops, by playing the role of arbiter (and depending on the host and quality of the programming, arbiter elegantiae) between the global and the local – or as some young people might regard it, the digital and the physical. Moreover, radio does this on a scale that is appreciable by the community.
To that end, community radio is still the most representative of what’s going on at the ground level of any broadcasting locality precisely because it is implicitly community based and rooted to a physical locality/broadcast radius. The Internet, for all of its wonders, cannot make that claim. Place can easily be dissolved in the web, which is both its strength and weakness. The Internet might be more democratic in terms of access to information, but actually less expressive in terms of what that information means to the person accessing it, and their world. Community radio helps to emphasize that while preserving micro-cultural diversity within larger regions by physically defining that community and giving that locality a collective voice.
Ironically, at least as it relates to music, the MySpace/online music revolution might have served to make community radio more relevant. Young people with seriously sophisticated media sensibilities often require more than a link to take something seriously. A link might get a cursory glance, but something physical and real – something tethered to human contact, effort, and excitement – is what garners the sustained look. When a local band or group or personality has made it on community radio it communicates that something about that band or group or personality – whatever it is – has translated beyond the flux and fire of the digital world for somebody. They’ve been pulled out of the faceless ether of information and brought into a real, physical community, and community radio is a much more authentic word of mouth than its digital counterparts because of it.
How do you feel about the relevance and value of radio in these digital days? How does the concept of a physical broadcasting range help form community?
And now, as always, some music.