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Mile 91 Station, Sierra Leone. Photo by Bill Siemering.
Radio Communities: The Other Side of The Electronic Divide
Using radio to create community, creating community radio. Why expect radio to do this? It’s malleable, anonymous, inexpensive to build, easy to transmit and receive, relatively speaking, even when the simple act of owning the box is punishable by an indefinite jail term. Radio is always possible. It is the link between local community and the global community. Radio creates a dimension in which various communities can meet, exchange, discuss and develop ideas, transforming the way we define notions of geography and public space. What political, cultural and humanitarian goals can be served by this medium exclusively? How does radio function as a tool for shared information?
Mansura Works On Radio Transmitter, Jordan
In November of 2006, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at New School for Social Research assembled a small group to discuss this topic. Panelists were Pete Tridish, founder, Prometheus Radio Project; William H. Siemering, President, Developing Radio Partners; Khin Phyu Htway, student, The New School and contributor to Voice of America, Burmese Service; Gregory Whitehead, writer and artist. Moderated by me, Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, Producer, Outer Voices.
We started with a presentation from Gregory Whitehead called, “Here Comes Everybody” and then moved to a panel discussion. The panel, and audience of fifty, focused on different ways of using radio as a kind of glue for creating community both here and abroad.
Minidisc Training, Jordan
Bios:
Khin Phyu Thway is a Burmese activist in exile. After fleeing to Thailand, she has led several pro-democracy campaigns for Burma, acting as leader of the women’s branch of the Democratic Party for a New Society. Eventually, she sought political asylum in Poland, and continuing her activist work, founded Polish-Burma Solidarity. Thway currently studies at the Eugene Lang College at the New School for Liberal Arts and is working at the Burmese Service of the Voice of America.
William H. Siemering, President of Developing Radio Partners, has been a leader in U.S. public radio management, local and national program development, and fundraising for more than 30 years. In 1993, after receiving a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Siemering began his international work, assisting radio stations in townships in South Africa. In 1995 as a Knight International Journalism Fellow, Siemering returned to South Africa, before returning to Washington D.C. in 1996-97 to serve as president of the International Center for Journalists. Most recently Siemering served for five years as senior radio advisor for the Open Society Institute (OSI) that funds civil society initiatives in more than fifty countries.
Final Touches On Transmitter, Jordan
Pete Tridish was a member of the founding collective Radio Mutiny, 91.3 FM in Philadelphia, and is also the founder of the Prometheus Radio Project. He actively participated in the rulemaking that led up to the adoption of Low Power FM and on the lawsuit Prometheus vs. the FCC, which held back a major round of media consolidation. Tridish has organized a multitude of community radio station barn-raisings, in the U.S. and internationally, and advised on hundreds of others.
Gregory Whitehead is an internationally renowned writer, director and producer of well over 100 radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures for the BBC, Radio France, Australia’s ABC and other broadcasters. His recent production of Normi Noel’s No Background Music received a Sony Gold Academy Award.
For the past twenty years Stephanie Guyer-Stevens has been working in the non-profit world and creating media. She started Outer Voices as a way to both examine social change by women in remote parts of the globe and to disseminate stories about their work in their communities.
As a recent interviewee told me, "Americans don’t get geography until they go to war," when they (we) encounter the comparative sizes of Iraq and California or Afghanistan and Connecticut.
So, given our mission for "communities" here, why not start with geography? The internet has lessened the impact of topographic boundaries on the exchange of ideas among like-minded individuals. For those weaned on the idea that the community is a village or a town — clear geographic entities — the "communities" brought to light by optic network, traumatized nerve endings, or informal social networks are risky things.
Which leads me to ask: If the geographic community is so self-informed and coherent, what could they possibly learn from outside observers?
In sum, how are you all identifying "communities" under the rubric of radio?
Hi Jackson,
A bit of delay in responding – apologies for that.. I am not completely clear where you’re headed with this one. A community can be self-informed and coherent and still need help building a radio station. Likewise, from the Outer Voices model, it’s because there are somewhat self-informed and coherent communities out there that we can glean knowledge from that we go and listen in on what they do and share that information out via radio. The community building in the Outer Voices example is real virtual community building – we listen in on the community work of women far away, and in turn listeners can figure ways to support what they’re doing with our means that we’ve got over here in the western world.
So how are we defining communities? I don’t think we ruled out any possible definition of how humans tend to create community on our conversation. The physical community created by people living among other people defines the place on the map where radio stations get built. The human tendency to build community invariably extends beyond the people who we see on the street on a daily basis. So there are intangible communities as well – there have been as long as people have been talking. When we talk about radio communities it comes down to who we are affecting when we create radio – who is building the station, as well as who is listening to the airwaves – two distinct communities perhaps, but nevertheless the airwaves perpetuates communication between them – a new community arises with each station being built – and additional communities emerge when people cluster together to discuss what they hear on the radio.
I’ll get the other panelists on the line here so they can give you their responses as well.
Hello Stephanie, Bill and the other panelists,
Thanks for posting a subject near and dear to my heart. I spent a month in South Africa in 1993 with a small team of folks from NPR, working to expand the best notions of what public radio could be. I returned to the US shamed (in the same way Pete mentions), inspired, and energized about how to use public radio to make social change. Sorry to say that I feel it has really taken me until just a few years ago to begin grassroots work here in my home region of California. I helped start (with community developer jesikah maria ross) a project modestly called "Saving The Sierra" (http://savingthesierra.org). Our aim is to gather and disseminate the true stories of local people conserving the environment, economy and culture of this immense rural area of California that supplies most of the resource wealth (water, timber, carbon sequestration, etc.) to the entire state. In the 400 mile-long mountain range there are only about 2 million people in a couple dozen communities. There are geographic, political, and economic divides to cross before people can get together to save our ways of life, our communities, and our resources. But I think we have to find a way to come together and soon. Development pressures are intense; waters wars are alive and well here. Some of our communities have become colonies of service providers for the wealthy, mostly urban, second- and third-home owners seeking a natural retreat.
We sent interns to public gatherings and asked people to answer a few questions: What is your favorite place or first memory of being in the Sierra? What issues can people work together on to preserve the Sierra for generations to come? What does conservation mean to you? We’ve published about 70 of these interviews as webstories. And we are using national public radio programs to continue making ripples about rural people’s love of their land and what actions they are taking to preserve it.
It is important for us rural Californians to hear our voices on the air, online. To hear about what is important to us and to reach out to make allies in the urban and suburban areas where there are enough voters to make policy changes that preserve the Sierra Nevada.
Our work must be long-term. There are just a few local radio stations, KVMR in Nevada City and a couple of LP stations scattered around. But few other opportunities to hear local voices. Next year, we’ll broadcast a documentary, but meantime we are trying to start a Sierra Citizen’s Media project.
In this work, I tend to feel much more aligned with media projects in developing nations than public, community or Pacifica stations that are so focused on urban populations around the US. But it feels really good to be working IN community with others who believe that radio and telling our own stories and developing media literacy and skills really can make a difference in our communities.
Thanks again for your thoughts.