[nettime-lat] FW: Independent radio and the Internet in Latin America

[fran ilich <ilich@sputnik.com.mx>]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent:       Mon, 27 Nov 2000 09:50:21 -0500
From:            Bruce Girard <bgirard@comunica.org>
Subject:         [cr-india] [GKD] Independent radio and the Internet in
Latin America
Send reply to:   cr-india@goacom.com

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 cybercafé 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 Púlsar is one of the first and most important examples of this.
Based in Ecuador, Púlsar 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 .
Púlsar 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. Púlsar'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.

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ilich.

nos vemos en el futuro.

http://www.sputnik.com.mx


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