At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, a survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.
Tag Archive for 'Pirates'
I found an article about London pirate radio stations first published in Sunday Times magazine in September 2003. In it the author, Matt Munday, tells how mobile phones and SMS are being used at Xtreme FM to keep contact with listeners:
A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip hop to saccharine R&B - like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions “urban” sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts, taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.
There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.
RSS Posts