| fran ilich on 7 Dec 2000 00:32:17 -0000 |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| [nettime-lat] FW: Independent radio and the Internet in Latin America |
------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 09:50:21 -0500 From: Bruce Girard <[email protected]> Subject: [cr-india] [GKD] Independent radio and the Internet in Latin America Send reply to: [email protected] Conclusions from the seminars, Mixed Media Medios Enteros and Converging Responsibility were presented to the UN TV Forum that took place Nov 16 and 17 at UN headquarters in New York. The panel that I was a part of was reduced from 3 hours to two and panelists opening statements were cut from 7 minutes to 5. The panel makeup was changed and included Martin Hala from CAMP, who attended the Kuala Lumpur conference, and Steve Buckley from the Community Media Association of the UK and Deputy President of AMARC. I am appending a copy of the opening statement. Five minutes isn't much time and I tried to concentrate the message on something that would be of interest to the television people present at the meeting - - - focusing on examples of radio's creative use of the Internet and on the problems associated with increasing concentration of ownership and control. Issues raised during the discussion included the importance of radio for promoting local culture. The UN will be preparing a report on the event, including recommendations. I'll let you know when it is available. I think they might eventually put the panel in Realvideo on their website at http://www.un.org/tvforum/ Thanks to all of you for your input. bg - --------- Digital Multiplication: Independent radio and the Internet in Latin America Bruce Girard Comunica The numbers behind the digital divide are well-known to the people in this forum. Of the 360 million people on-line in the world, 70% are in North America and Europe, home to 10% of the world's population. In many Latin American countries less than 1% of the population is connected to the Internet. This is in sharp contrast to radio, which reaches more than 90% of households -- connecting them to a network that would be the envy of any telecommunications company in the region. In North America and Europe we tend to take radio for granted � a radio is something you get for free when you buy a car. In Latin America, radio is an essential medium. It's the most readily available, the most effective, the most accessible, the most affordable and the most flexible mass medium. Most Latin American radio is produced locally, which contrasts dramatically with television. 62% of programming on Latin American TV screens comes from the United States. Radio talks about what is going on in its community. And it interprets the world from the perspective of its community and in the languages and with the accents of that community. Local radio also plays an essential role in building and sustaining more just and democratic societies by reinforcing and amplifying demands for greater accountability of politicians, governments and businesses, and by exposing violations of citizen and consumer rights. The background statement for this panel asked us what we can learn from radio's digital experimentation. The simple answer is the jury is still out. We can conclude that digital technologies are transforming radio. But we don't yet know whether that transformation will contribute to a media environment that is freer and more reflective of Latin America's diversity, or if it will just create an illusion of participation and democracy, behind which hides an increasingly inaccessible media. On the downside, digital technology, combined with weak media policy, has contributed to the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few multimedia companies. In some countries, Argentina, Peru and Brazil, for example, the introduction of digital satellite technologies has allowed multimedia empires to build what they call national radio networks, essentially turning hundreds of independent radio stations into repeater stations rebroadcasting programmes produced in the national capital. As a result, a resident of Cajamarca, a provincial capital in the Peruvian Andes, finds it easier to get information about weather and traffic in Lima, than about issues and events taking place in Cajamarca. Digital multiplication There are, however, a number of projects that use the Internet to strengthen independent and community-based radio stations, to improve their coverage of national and regional issues and to attempt to address the digital divide with a tactic of multiplying the effectiveness of the limited Internet access that is available. In the same way that a single cybercaf� or telecentre with a few computers can multiply the number of people connected, giving access to hundreds of people with only a few computers, a radio station with tens of thousands of listeners that makes active use of the Internet can greatly multiply the impact of its Internet connection as one way of addressing the problem of the digital divide. Networks One way they are doing this is by setting up low-cost Internet-based networks for exchanging news and information among independent stations. Latin American radio stations have not historically done a very good job of informing their listeners of regional and international news. Most stations get their international news from newspapers, which get in turn get it from US or European-based news agencies, or they get it from CNN and other satellite television stations. The news agenda is set in North America. If there's another side to the story, it comes from Europe. The result is that more Colombian youth can name the president of the United States than the president of Colombia. And if you listen to radio or TV news in Ecuador, a small country next door to Colombia that is greatly influenced by Colombia's economic conditions, politics, and culture, what do you hear about Colombia? That the United States has a domestic drug problem it can't handle. Independent radio stations are using the Internet to overcome this problem by setting up networks for exchanging news and programmes. The Agencia Informativa P�lsar is one of the first and most important examples of this. Based in Ecuador, P�lsar began in 1996 by sending a daily regional news bulletin to 48 radio stations via the Internet. At the time we used to joke that they were the only stations in Latin America connected to the Internet . P�lsar now offers a number of different services, including audio clips in MP3 format, to 2,500 subscribers, half of them radio stations, in more than 50 countries world-wide. P�lsar's news contrasts with that of the major news agencies because it isn't filtered through a US or European perspective. Gateways Another way that radio stations are making creative use of the Internet is with programmes that serve as gateways to the Internet. In this role the station is part search-engine, part librarian and part journalist. It sifts through the tetra-bytes of data on the Net to find information that is useful to their communities and then interprets it - making useful information meaningful. Radio Yungas, a rural station in Bolivia is one example. The station has a daily program in which listeners send in their questions. The answers used to come from the 15 year-old encyclopaedia in the town library, but now they come from the Internet. When a local farmer sent in a description of an unknown worm that was eating his crops, Yungas sent the message out to a specialised electronic list. Six hours later they had an answer from a Swede, a leading worm expert, in which he identified the worm and explained how to deal with it. The answer was broadcast to the entire community, and we can be sure that the farmer with the question was not the only one with the worm problem. Conclusion The radio/Internet combination could make a tremendous contribution to development and democracy at the grassroots in Latin America and elsewhere. But we have to make sure that the benefits offered by technologies aren't used just to concentrate ownership in fewer and fewer hands, making radio less diversified and less able to serve as a people's communication channel . We need to open discussion of broadcast policy in all the countries of the region. We need policies that will encourage pluralism in the granting of frequencies and that will support independent local broadcast media, both radio and television. For radio this means stopping the trend toward centralisation. Television has never enjoyed the kind of independence that radio has and local TV programming has always been rare. With television we are starting from a point where control and ownership has always been concentrated in very few hands. To change this will be a tremendous challenge. But I think that we have to take up that challenge. - ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[email protected]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[email protected]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org> ilich. nos vemos en el futuro. http://www.sputnik.com.mx _______________________________________________ nettime-lat mailing list [email protected] http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-lat