Radio programming is something that has always spoken about the audience it reaches out to. Content that is broadcast on the radio is targeted towards a particular audience and it displays certain connective properties while highlighting a certain level of symbolic significance in its selection and presentation of content. In mass media, radio programming and content serve to link listeners together at the global level by presenting news from around the world, insights into popular culture, and influential ideas that embody a certain level of symbolic importance when considering transnational culture and its flows. In essence, it characterizes a global identity. However, the content of mass radio is somewhat detached from the actual lives of its listeners, as it serves to identify with an idealized audience, consequently failing to engage at a realistic or personal level. Its utility and impact in the daily lives of its listeners, all separate due to physical location, is limited by its power to influence those receptive to its agenda that assumes commonalities and a connection between its listeners, diminishing its value at the local level.
It is with community radio stations where a more direct reflection of the immediate needs of the community can be expressed in a less directed and controlled manner than the programming of mass radio stations and their networks. Community radio stations can offer a less idealized characterization of real local existence and its identifying features that serve to strengthen the link between community members. By relaying local events, music, ideas, and politics that are passed over by mass media and its contributors, community radio stations create and reflect an accurate identity of a cultural community that enables transmission and movement of information and ideas without being limited by the inefficiencies of face-level interaction.
The connective and culturally reflective properties of radio are effectively characterized in Dennis Allen’s documentary CBQM, focusing on the citizen-run station that serves the people of Fort McPherson. The community radio station depicts the strengthening of a local community that goes beyond face-level interaction by relaying local events, music, ideas, and politics over the air, targeting its local audience consisting of truckers heading north on the Dempster Highway, trappers confined to their cabins, and Gwich’in ladies doing beadwork. By recognizing the separateness within such a small community, while understanding the human need for relating to something symbolic, something connected to locality, and something that establishes a certain level of identity, it becomes entirely possible to see the benefit of community radio in being an important aspect of local existence.
In considering text, Daniel Fischer’s Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia does a good job of expressing the inherent symbolism of localized content and its ability to display connective properties and create a sense of community and identity in its presentation. It stresses content that serves to realize the history of Aboriginal incarceration and the geographic dispersal of kin networks with music by focusing on the interweaving of speech and country song in request programs that highlight the connective properties of local radio with its local listeners. By understanding content and presentation in localities such as Northern Australia, it becomes clear of the direction and assumptions of transnational flows of globalized media and its audiences.
Allen, Dennis. CBQM. National Film Board of Canada. 2010.
Fisher, Daniel. Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology. 2009.
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