Showing papers in "The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media in 2020"

Radio, music, podcasts – BBC Sounds: Public service radio and podcasts in a platform world

Abstract: In 2018, the BBC announced plans to replace their long-established ‘iPlayer Radio’ service with a new platform called BBC Sounds. The new service was promoted as a single space where listeners can consume BBC radio, music and podcasts, creating a single point of interaction between audiences and content. This is, however, far more than an exercise in reframing public service radio content in a new app; it is also a practical application of these policies through the commissioning of content made for online, specifically, younger, audiences. This shift happens not only at a time where traditional broadcasters are exploring ways to re-engage younger listeners but as commentators search for the ‘Netflix of Podcasts’ This article explores the manner in which the BBC Sounds project is a response to current trends in the radio industry and to which it recognizes podcasting as an audio medium that is distinct from but institutionally connected to radio

Not Entirely Analog(ous): Low-Power FM Radio as Community, Relations, and Knowledge in Context

Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communication systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective in a moment of rampant breathless digital utopianism. This article explores the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge through specific sociotechnical arrangements, low-power FM (LPFM) radio and large-scale commercial Internet-based ‘platforms’, both of which exist in our historical present. In particular, I use the formation of LPFM, which occurred at the same time that commercial Internet traffic picked up steam, in order to ‘excavate the future’: I return to a not-so-distant past to consider what might yet be. The article’s central claim is that the case of LPFM is even more relevant now than at its inception, in a context where behemoth commercial Internet ‘platforms’ have come to dominate electronic communication.

Co-designing convivial tools to support participation in community radio

Abstract: Connectivity made possible by the diffusion of digital technologies has offered new possibilities for the public to interact with media, including radio. However, interactions are often framed by globally managed platforms, owned by companies with values based on maximizing profit, rather than prioritising Illich’s forms of conviviality. In this article, we draw on experiences from the Grassroot Wavelengths project that introduces an innovative peer-to-peer platform to support the creation and management of community radio stations. We offer insight into the practices of participation in community media, where the users influence decisions concerning the technology, the content, the actors and the organization policy of the radio station, through a participatory design approach. These collaborations between researchers and users, together with a focus on the development of relational assets in local contexts, are fundamental in an attempt to design a platform that fosters conviviality and offers an alternative way to consider participation in community media.

Provincializing Spotify: Radio, algorithms and conviviality

Abstract: Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article ‘provincializes’ music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the ‘convivial’, collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream ‘The Flaming Robot of Love’ during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the ‘Free Music Archive Radio App’ that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests’ algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up’s open API offline in 2016, it engaged in ‘primitive accumulation’ of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA ‘recomposed’ – adapted to a new medium and a new political context – collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional ‘conviviality’ in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

Producing Diversity in BBC Radio

Abstract: The voices of minority ethnic staff working in radio are very rarely heard. In fact, the UK radio industry has been singled out, by the government approved regulatory body, as continuing to fail to reflect the diversity of British communities ‐ both on-air and in terms of employment. This article illustrates the perspectives of minority ethnic workers employed at the BBC on the Asian Network, a specialist ethnic radio station, and examines how they craft programme and news content for a distinctive audience. Through in-depth interviews with 30 BBC employees, there is look at the challenges, conflict and barriers this group of staff face. The interviews expose a difference of opinion among staff over the core target audience and the version of Asian identity articulated on-air and demonstrate that a rigid gatekeeping system restricts the dissemination of news content about all the communities that comprise the group British Asian.

Listening while doing things: Radio, gender and older women

Abstract: This article investigates the role of radio in older women’s everyday lives. Based on interviews with listeners in Britain and Germany, it argues that patriarchy structures women’s radio listening into old age. The women who participated in this study accommodated their radio listening to their role as housewives, deliberately choosing content that does not distract from their work and making sure they do not invade their husbands’ space with radio sound. Across their radio day, older women move in and out of different forms of listening, characterized by different levels of attentiveness. They enjoy radio as background noise to domestic labour, but they also use radio as a resource for identity work and a critical engagement with gender politics.

Radio and media history as a methodology for conviviality

Abstract: This article illustrates how research into the history of radio and media can become a methodological ‘tool for conviviality’ by discussing my research into the very low-powered Tokyo station, Radio Home Run. In 1986, Ivan Illich visited Radio Home Run to participate in a programme that not only exhibited characteristics of his concept of conviviality, but that was also partially inspired by this concept as well as his critiques of industrial society and institutional life. During this programme, Illich sat on the floor of a small Tokyo apartment – the station’s make-shift studio – to share food, drink and a microphone with members of the station as he discussed his ideas with those in attendance. About five years prior to his visit, early members of Radio Home Run and its predecessor Radio Polybucket had been inspired by the writings of Illich and other progressive thinkers to develop their own theory and practice of radio-making, which they described as narrowcasting. They implemented this theoretically inspired practice throughout the station’s tenure (roughly 1983–96) both discussing and demonstrating conviviality with Illich during his 1986 visit. In 2016, 30 years after Illich’s visit, I met with former Radio Home Run members to collect oral histories, facilitate group interviews and conduct archival research about the station and its practices. I implemented a methodology that combines traditional practices of media and radio history with practices of art history focused on the perspectives and accounts of creators, such as those advocated by Lucy Lippard and Kristine Stiles. As I travelled throughout Japan to sit, share food and drink and discuss the past with groups and individuals, I experienced what it was like to participate in Radio Home Run’s convivial practices of narrowcasting. I also participated in the collective reconstruction of Radio Home Run’s collective history by documenting conversations as members pieced their memories together and revisited material from their personal archives, which shed new light on the station and its convivial practices. This article discusses and reflects upon the convivial nature of my research experiences in order to propose a methodology of radio and media arts history research that can serve as a methodological tool for conviviality in the present and the future.

Scripting the radio interview: Performing Desert Island Discs

Abstract: Desert Island Discs reveals much about the BBC’s early approach to the radio interview. The radio programme calls for its audience, the host and a ‘castaway’ to engage in a fantasy where guests are invited to preselect musical records to accompany them on a fictional desert island. This concept acts as a vehicle in which the host asks questions or makes statements about the significance of these records, in order to unearth the private motivations of a public figure. This has proved itself as a predictable, reassuring and innovative format that all parties must commit to. This article addresses the first decade of the programme, where all interviews were scripted. Studying the origins of this series allows us to cast some assertions on the ways that scripting was used to communicate and mediate a host’s persona and an interviewee’s past and personality. The use of scripting was intended to create a sense of informality, humour and theatrical drama. Contextualizing these types of scripted exchanges further informs our understanding of the radio interview within our mediated cultural heritage.

Indigenizing radio in Ghana

Abstract: Radio is hailed as Africa’s medium of choice in the global communication age. Introduced as a colonial tool of information, education and entertainment in the early 1930s, radio broadcasting was mainly in colonial languages as colonial administrators perceived local language broadcasting a threat to their empire building and ‘civilization’ agendas. The fortunes of local language broadcasting did not dramatically change in the independence era when broadcast media were in the firm control of the state. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, mostly resulting from a more liberalized media environment, local language broadcasting has undergone unprecedented growth. Drawing on written archival material, including internal communication among policy-makers, audience letters, key informant interviews and findings from a recent audience study, this article charts the progressive development of local language radio broadcasting in Ghana, and engages with the role played by early audiences and broadcasters in indigenizing broadcast content.

Radio drama as art and industry : a case study on the textual and institutional entanglements of the radio play The Slow Motion Film

Abstract: This article argues that in order to obtain a deeper comprehension of the radio play as a work of art, one should complement the dominant method of textual analysis with industry analysis. This argument is illustrated by means of a case study on the 1967 Belgian radio play The Slow Motion Film. This radio play is an adaptation (in fact, a re-adaptation as there had been radio adaptations in 1940 and 1950) of the innovative theatre play The Slow Motion Film (1922) by Herman Teirlinck. In order to explain the creative choices of the radio play, which are largely based on the pursuit of fidelity to the source work, the institutional aspect is of great importance. The goal of honouring Teirlinck and highlighting the cultural-historical importance of his work fitted within the broader cultural-educational mandate of the public broadcaster, which prevented a more inventive adaptation. This article argues that in order to gain a better understanding of the radio play as a text, the industrial context also needs to be studied. Furthermore, this article contributes to the largely unwritten history of the radio play in the Low Countries.

Radio studies beyond broadcasting: Towards an intermedia and inter-technological radio history

Abstract: Examining radio development over a long time span from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, in this article, we claim that radio history is broader than the history of broadcasting only. We suggest looking at radio history through the perspective of intermediality and inter-technology, drawing on five different examples: radiography, radiotelegraphy/radiotelephony, radar and satellites, radiomobile/mobile phones with regard to radio spectrum and packet radio networks, such as Wi-Fi. We demonstrate how and why these (and other) technologies should be considered parts of radio studies even though they do not represent classic examples of radio broadcasting. Overall, this intermedia and inter-technological perspective on radio history offers new ways of rethinking and reformulating the confines of radio studies, as well as contributes to a greater field of media studies.

Building a language community through radio in the age of social media: the case of Raidió na Life

Abstract: This paper investigates the motivations of volunteers in participating in broadcasting on a community radio station in the age of social media. The station chosen broadcasts in Irish, a minority language in Ireland, although it is also the state’s national and first official language. It was founded to support and develop the community of Irish speakers in an English-speaking environment. Raidió na Life is based in Dublin and broadcasts to a mixed and dispersed population of Irish language speakers. One of the original aims of the station was to build a sense of community and linguistic empowerment for these people. Data generated by interviews and focus groups reveal that volunteers do not seem to share these clear-cut aims, in fact they seem to lack a sense of themselves as language or community activists. However, the performances of their roles as voluntary broadcasters, particularly in their engagement with their audiences on air and online, appear to be having the desired effect of building social, cultural and linguistic networks. The article demonstrates how social, communicative and cultural benefits can accrue through traditional broadcasting and new social media, even where practitioners are unaware of this dimension to their work. The element of fun or enjoyment keeps people volunteering and makes it personally worth their while. This is found to be more important than any sense of language or community activism as a motivation for participation in the station and is actually one of the reasons why Raidió na Life has manged to stay so successfully on air for the past 27 years.

Community Radio’s Amplification of Communication for Social Change, Juliet Fox (2019)

Abstract: Review of: Community Radio’s Amplification of Communication for Social Change, Juliet Fox (2019) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 252 pp., ISBN 978-3-03017-315-9, h/bk, £47.23

British Radio Drama, 1945–63, Hugh Chignell (2020)

Abstract: Review of: British Radio Drama, 1945–63, Hugh Chignell (2020) London: Bloomsbury, 200 pp., ISBN 978-1-50132-969-2, h/bk, £86.40