It is fitting that we are meeting here in Italy, the birthplace
of Guglielmo Marconi, who one hundred years ago demonstrated the
communication potential of radio technology. Until Marconi's
January 1901 transmission of the news of Queen Victoria's death
from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall, a distance of 300 kilometres,
it was believed that radio waves could not follow the curvature of
the earth and that broadcasts were therefore limited to a maximum
of about 100 kilometres. Marconi's experiment not only proved this
wrong, but set the stage for his first transatlantic wireless
transmission, between Cornwall and Newfoundland, Canada, in
December of the same year.
Marconi's 1901 broadcasts are worth noting at this meeting for
two reasons.
On the one hand, the innovations that accompanied these early
radio transmissions were the same ones that shortly afterwards
enabled modern broadcast radio. Technology advanced at the pace we
grew used to in the 20th century and only five years
after Marconi's historic transatlantic broadcast, radio operators
on ships in the Atlantic were surprised to hear a human voice
emitting from the Marconi-built equipment that normally emitted
the dots and dashes of Morse code. It was 1906 and Reginald
Fessenden, a Canadian inventor, had made the first long-distance
audio broadcast. Three years after that, the first regularly
broadcasting station was transmitting news and recorded music
programs every Wednesday night to a handful of pre-Silicon Valley
residents of San José, California who had bought radio receivers
before there were any stations to listen to.
But the wireless communication afforded by Marconi's
experiments was more than a technological advance. It was also an
important milestone for the real-time globalisation that was one
of the most significant phenomena of the last century, and of the
large-scale social and economic consequences that accompanied it.
Marconi's transmitters may have been bulky and hugely expensive by
today's standards, but their size doesn't diminish their
significance as a harbinger of the information superhighway,
permitting real-time global movement of information at the speed
of light, at least for those who were in the centres of global
economic activity. For those on the periphery, Marconi's
transmission was an analogue precursor of the digital divide.
In this paper I will first discuss the nature of the digital
divide and some limitations of a US-style Internet model in the
context of rural Africa and then some of the characteristics that
have enabled radio's success in the same context. Following that I
will look at ways the Internet and rural radio are working
together to form low cost networks, to improve radio programming,
and to facilitate communication with emigrant communities.
Finally, I will make some concluding remarks and some suggestions
for the way forward.
The Digital Divide
One hundred years later, the digital divide occupies an
important place on the agenda of governments, international
agencies and civil society organisations throughout the world.
Over the past few years there have been countless seminars,
studies and statements about the digital divide, the knowledge
gap, and the role of knowledge in development. Not surprisingly,
the Internet has provided the most active forum for discussion of
these issues. A search for the phrase digital divide in
Google's search engine returns references to more than 250,000
pages.
As the debate continues, the definition of the problem has
become less and less clear, while the complexity of the issues has
become more apparent.
A few years ago the main thrust of the debate focused on
questions of access to information technology. Cutting edge
activities included privatising State telephone monopolies,
establishing internet service providers, and developing affordable
technologies to extend access. This view was highlighted recently
with the G8's Okinawa meeting's focus on the digital divide.
Eliminating the access divide is a task of daunting
proportions.
While the numbers vary according to who is counting, the trends
behind the access side of the digital divide debate are well
known. According to NUA, an Irish company that has been tracking
and consolidating Internet use surveys since 1995, there are 407
million people online in the world – about 6.5% of the world's
population. Of these, 69% are in North America or Western Europe,
home to 10% of the world's population. A handful of Asia/Pacific
countries account for almost 26%. Barely 4% are in Latin America.
Sub-Saharan Africa, with roughly the same population as North
America and Europe combined, has about 3/4 of one percent of the
world's Internet users.(2) Sixty-five percent of Canadian adults
are online.(3) In Africa, less than one percent of the population
is online – more than half of them in South Africa and virtually
none in rural areas.
And let us not forget that one third of the world's population
has no access to electricity and three quarters has yet to make a
telephone call. On the other side of the divide, by 2005 the
number of US households with highspeed Internet subscriptions is
predicted to reach 36 million, exceeding the number of households
with dialup access for the first time.(4)
If the only way of harnessing knowledge for development is to
address the digital divide and to provide rural Africa with
whatever level of access is enjoyed in the developed world, then
we should not expect to succeed in our lifetime. While technology
is important, it will not be enough to focus exclusively on
the quantitative development of Africa's rural communication
infrastructure (more computers, more satellites, more bandwidth,
more speed). If rural Africa is to harness knowledge for
development, it will have to do so with new strategies and
different technologies, and by building on strengths it already
has.
Even if we were able to address the digital divide in
terms of infrastructure roll-out, providing rural Africa with
access to the Internet, this would not solve the problem. The
information and communication possibilities offered by the
Internet represent a necessary but not sufficient contribution to
the problem of harnessing knowledge for rural development.
As the debate is better understood, it is becoming clear that
the essence of what is required is not technology, but relevant
and meaningful content, digital or not. Escaping from poverty
requires knowledge, and knowledge is transported in content. It is
also becoming clear that the distribution systems for that content
are most effective when building on the local information systems
currently in use. This allows for what Richard Heeks refers to as community
intermediaries, institutions and individuals that use the
Internet and serve as a bridge between it and the community
members. Characteristics that make good community intermediaries
include "proximity, trust and knowledge (including the
ability to combine ‘techknowledge’ about ICT with ‘context
knowledge’ about the environment in which it is used)".(5)
Thus, while the Internet is one way knowledge can be accessed,
it is not the only way. Nor is it necessarily the best way. It is
here that radio has shown strength in the past and, with the right
strategies and policies, may play an essential role for the
future.
Rural radio
More than ninety years after the world's first station was
founded, radio is still the most pervasive, accessible,
affordable, and flexible mass medium available. In rural areas, it
is often the only mass medium available.
Low production and distribution costs have made it possible for
radio to interpret the world from local perspectives, and to
respond to local needs for information. More than any other mass
communication medium, radio speaks in the language and with the
accent of its community. Its programming reflects local interests
and it can make important contributions to both the heritage and
the development of the cultures, economies and communities that
surround it.
More than any other medium, radio is local. In Latin America,
for example, while most radio is produced locally or nationally,
only 30% of television programming comes from the region; with 62%
produced in the United States.(6) Quechua, a language spoken by
some 10 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, is all but
absent from the region's television screens, but in Peru alone an
estimated 180 radio stations regularly offer programmes in the
language. The same is true in Africa, where local radio stations
produce their own programs and speak in the languages of their
communities.
Radio is also widely available. While there are only two
telephone lines for every hundred people in Africa, there are
twenty radio receivers per hundred – even in rural areas most
people have access to a receiver. Radio stations are also common.
Fifteen years ago there were only ten independent stations in all
of sub-Saharan Africa; now there are thousands, many of them in
rural areas. In 1985 the term rural radio usually referred
to a division within the national broadcaster that produced
programs in the capital and broadcast them to the countryside. Now
rural radio is local radio. In addition to rural
populations, women, youth, ethnic and linguistic minorities and
even children have benefited from the explosion of radio and see
themselves reflected in the media for the first time.
Long before the Internet inspired the convergence of media and
telecommunications, rural radio was fulfilling a role as a
"community telephone" with several hours a day reserved
for broadcasting personal messages, birth and death announcements,
invitations to parties, ordering food and supplies from the store
in the next village, calling for emergency medical assistance and
even for receiving personal medical advice from the local doctor.
In many rural areas radio is the only source of information
about market prices for crops, and thus the only defence against
speculators. It is used in agricultural extension programmes, is a
vehicle for both formal and informal education, and plays an
important role in the preservation of local language and culture.
While in some parts of the world we take radio for granted,
seeing it as little more than an accessory for an automobile, in
others it fulfils a variety of roles: it is the only mass medium
that most people have access to; it is a "personal"
communication medium fulfilling the function of a community
telephone; and it is a school, the community's first point of
contact with the global knowledge infrastructure.
The medium has demonstrated tremendous potential to promote
development. Relevant, interesting and interactive radio enables
neglected communities to be heard and to participate in the
democratic process. And having a say in decisions that shape their
lives ultimately improves their living standards.
Next Generation Radio(7)
Probably the four most important characteristics contributing
to radio's success as a medium for development are its
pervasiveness, its local nature, the fact that it is an oral
medium, and its ability to involve communities and individuals in
an interactive communication process.
The Internet is also characterised by its interactivity, and,
technically, its potential in this area is far greater than radio’s.
It is also a store of useful knowledge and among its 300 million
pages there is a substantial amount of information relevant to
development issues. However, in addition to the overwhelming
problem of access that we have already looked at, the Internet
faces hurdles related to language(8), high functional illiteracy
rates, lack of an interface with indigenous information systems,
and a lack of local content or relevance.
Over the past five years a number of experiments have initiated
ways of blending independent local radio and the Internet. Many of
these were presented and discussed at a pair of seminars, one of
Asian radio broadcasters held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in
September 1999(9), and the other of broadcasters from Latin
America and the Caribbean, held in Florida, USA in September
2000.(10) Similar projects have also been undertaken in Africa,
North America and Europe. These experiments have taken three main
forms:
- projects that use ICTs to support low-cost independent radio
networks;
- projects that use radio stations as community intermediaries
or gateways to the Internet, and;
- projects that use ICTs to facilitate communication between
the local communities and emigrants.
Networks
Agencia Informativa Púlsar
The first major initiative to link independent radio stations
via the Internet was the Agencia Informativa Púlsar, a
Spanish-language radio news and information agency based in
Ecuador that distributes its material via email and the web.(11)
Púlsar began in 1996, sending a daily news summary of 10-12
stories via email to forty-eight subscribers in Latin America. The
main sources of information at the time were the websites of the
few Latin American newspapers on the Internet and IPS's daily
dispatches. The news from these sources was rewritten in radio
style and from the perspective of Latin American civil society and
the bulletins were emailed as a "rip and read" service.
News staff at the stations were free to use the stories they
wanted and to read them over the air.
Five years later, Púlsar's services are sent by email to more
than 2,500 subscribers in over fifty countries and are freely
available on a website that is updated several times a day. The
agency has also diversified its news sources, adding, among
others, a network of more than twenty correspondents and a number
of independent national or thematic news services. In 1997 Púlsar
began offering an additional audio service, featuring short clips
in MP3 format, to those stations that had the technical capacity
to receive and use them. Some news items are available in full
audio and a daily audio news roundup can be downloaded from the
agency's website.
A survey of community and independent radio stations conducted
prior to Púlsar's launch helped to identify some of the problems
that were facing them at the time and thus to determine the
services to be offered. The study focused on the changing radio
market, sources for international news and information
programming, and opportunities offered by the Internet.
The changing radio market
The study revealed a number of tendencies that were threatening
independent radio in the region:
- Competition was fierce
. Liberalisation and deregulation
of broadcasting had resulted in a dramatic increase in the
number of radio stations in Latin America. Even smaller towns
had a number of stations. The increase in the number of stations
had not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in radio
advertising expenditures. In some cities the number of radio
stations had increased by 300% while radio advertising
expenditures had only increased by 20%. To make matters worse,
changing donor priorities meant that established community and
popular radio stations, especially those associated with the
Catholic Church, were losing the resources from Europe and North
America that they had grown accustomed to. Without these
international resources, they had to cut their budgets and look
for new revenue sources, primarily in the already competitive
advertising market.
- National satellite networks were being consolidated
.
Multimedia corporations were buying or otherwise gaining control
over many of the new stations. They then established national
networks to broadcast the programming of radio stations located
in the capital cities to smaller cities and towns, at the
expense of local programming. Some of the networks had more than
100 repeater stations throughout the country, all broadcasting
the same programming.
International news sources
While local independent radio stations had a marked advantage
in terms of local news and information, the survey showed that
they had very few good international news sources available to
them. The most common source for independent radio stations was
newspapers. In the case of rural stations, this was often
yesterday's newspapers from the capital. Other sources included
foreign cable and satellite television stations and international
shortwave stations. While very few radio stations subscribe to the
services of the major international news agencies, almost all
international news comes indirectly from them, since they are the
primary international source for most media. The predictable
result of this was that international news, including news from
neighbouring Latin American countries, reflected North American
and European priorities rather than Latin American ones. News
about Colombia, for example, rarely dealt with the country's
internal tensions or with its relations with its South American
neighbours, which were important. It was more likely to be
concerned with the relation between Colombia and the USA's drug
problem. This situation is not unique to Latin America and I am
sure many of the people at this meeting are familiar with it in
their own countries.
Internet
Finally, the Internet was considered – both as a potential
source of news and information and as a distribution channel.
- In 1995 there was very little Latin American content on the
Internet – perhaps a dozen mainstream newspapers and a few
interesting alternative sources dealing with particular
countries or themes. However, in the United States the
traditional media were establishing a strong online presence
and it was expected that Latin America would follow suit as
soon as the infrastructure allowed. Only a few months after
the survey, the Zapatistas began to aggressively occupy online
space and Latin America began to open up to the Internet at a
dizzying pace.
- Two Latin American countries did not yet have a permanent
connection to the Internet and email was not yet common in the
region. Only a few dozen independent stations used email, and
most could see no reason why it would be useful, since there
was not yet a significant amount of useful information
available in Spanish.
- The low-cost of publication and distribution afforded by the
Internet offered an opportunity to start up a news service
without the huge investment that would normally be required.
The Internet seemed to offer some exciting possibilities, but
they had to be guessed at – Netscape's version 1.0
was out, but only in English, Microsoft still hadn't
recognised the importance of the Internet and Internet
Explorer did not exist, neither RealAudio nor MP3
were available. It was still a gamble that the Internet was
going to expand in the region, and nobody imagined that it
would do so at the speed it has over the past five years.
Objectives
Armed with an analysis that showed: I) a threat to independent
and community radio that required them to be more competitive, II)
a weakness in the news and information offerings of these
stations, and III) a technology that would help overcome the
weakness and thus make the stations more competitive, the
following objectives were established for Púlsar's first
experimental years:
- To make community and independent radio more competitive by
contributing to the improvement of its programming, prestige,
credibility and impact;
- To contribute to the technological modernisation of
independent and community radio;
- To help develop a better understanding among independent
broadcasters of regional and global issues and to promote
themes associated with democratic development, regional
integration (more than 80% of Púlsar's news was from Latin
America), peace, human rights and the right to communicate;
- To open opportunities for citizen participation in local,
national, regional and world fora, with a particular priority
on the participation of traditionally excluded sectors.
Lessons learned
After nearly five years of operation, there are far more
lessons to be learned from Púlsar than time allows us to mention.
However, I would like to highlight a few that I think will be
useful to keep in mind during our deliberations over the next few
days.
Púlsar was introduced at a time when Internet connectivity was
difficult, just as it now is in the rural areas of Africa that we
are considering in this meeting. There was a good deal of
scepticism from donors, radio associations and even some potential
users. However, while access was a problem at the beginning, it
quickly became less of a problem. There are any number of
solutions to rural Africa's access problems on the horizon:
including direct satellite connectivity and other wireless
technologies. We have to be aware of these possibilities, and to
make plans for them.
Púlsar's strategy has been to provide service at a number of
levels: text, audio clips, and full audio. The additional cost of
the extra levels of service cost is minimal and the scaleable
service ensures that the service is widely available.
Strategically, it allows for new users to adopt the service at
their current capability, and then to grow as their own access and
expertise permits.
Other Networks
There are a number of other Internet/radio networking projects
going on in the world and there are many others in different
regions and with different styles and objectives.
Kantor Berita Radio 68H
Kantor Berita Radio 68H is an Indonesian radio network that
began in 1998 with the fall of the Suharto regime, which had
banned independent news programs and obliged the country's
thousands of radio stations to carry an official newscast. Radio
68H uses the Internet to link radio stations scattered throughout
Indonesia, a country of 200 million people living on more than
13,000 islands. The project distributes its material via email and
a website.(12) Unlike Púlsar, Radio 68H only distributes the
complete audio files of its reports. The resultant file size
exceeds the capacity of the Internet connections available to many
stations, limiting the network's reach. To overcome this, Radio
68H is experimenting with satellite distribution of its service.
Banque de Programmes On-Line
An extension of Panos West Africa's Banque de Programmes,
which distributes tapes of documentaries from West and Central
Africa to one hundred stations across the continent, the Banque
de Programmes On-Line (BDP On-line) exchanges programs between
ten African stations via the Internet. Because the programs are
full audio, and thus very large files, the service has had a
difficult time. However, as infrastructure and technology improve,
and as a planned service becomes available on satellite, the BDP
On-line will become more available to African broadcasters. The
project is based at Panos West Africa office in Dakar and
information is available at its website and of course from the
Panos representative present at this meeting.(13)
InterWorld Radio
Started in August 2000 as a joint project of Panos (London) and
One World, "the world's leading portal on global
justice", InterWorld Radio commissions journalists to
file reports on economics, the environment, science and
technology, human rights and social change and makes them
available via email or on the web. It produces both daily
summaries of news stories and regular features. InterWorld Radio's
programs are intended to be equally suitable for radio stations in
the North and South, although unfortunately they are only
available in English.
Technically, InterWorld Radio tries to provide something for
everyone. If you have a bad Internet connection, you can get daily
text summaries of its programs by email. If you have a highspeed
connection, you can download broadcast quality versions in either
MP3 or RealAudio format, and if you just want to listen online,
lower quality streaming audio is available, also in either
MP3 or RealAudio format. With digital technology, offering a
variety of formats takes very little time and effort and helps
ensure a wider audience for the material.
Gateways
In the same way that a single cybercafé or telecentre with a
few computers can be an efficient way of increasing the number of
people connected, giving access to hundreds of people with only a
few computers, a radio station with thousands of listeners that
makes active use of the Internet can address the problem of the
digital divide with a tactic of digital multiplication,
multiplying the impact of its Internet connection.
The UNESCO-supported Kotmale Internet Project in Sri
Lanka is one of the best-known examples of a radio station
adopting the role of a gateway or community intermediary between
its listeners and the Internet. The Internet Project has two main
components: a community telecentre, using a dedicated line
provided by the telecommunications regulatory body, and Radio
Browsing, a daily two-hour radio program in which journalists
take the Internet to the community by surfing the web in search of
answers to listener queries. Sifting through the Internet's
terabytes of data, Radio Browsing finds information that is useful
to the communities and then interprets it - making useful
information meaningful. It plays a role that is part
search-engine, part librarian, part journalist and part translator
(English is the language of the Internet, but not of most Sri
Lankans).
Another example of a station playing a gateway role is Radio
Yungas, a rural station in Bolivia. 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.
A Peruvian experiment is trying to do something similar in
conditions where the stations do not have any access to the
Internet or even to a telephone. The project is being coordinated
by the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG-Peru).
Questions from three communities will be relayed by their local
radio stations to ITDG's office in the provincial capital of
Cajamarca via shortwave radio transceivers. ITDG staff will
provide the answers, using whatever sources they have available,
including not only the Internet but also indigenous expertise
and experience available in the communities. The answers will
be sent back to the station and included in a database which will
be regularly updated, and made available on the WWW and on CD Rom
to the radio stations and other information centres in the
communities that are equipped with computers. In this way the
database will be not only a living record of the questions and
answers most sought out in the communities, but also a tool for
collecting, ordering and sharing local knowledge.
In March 2000 the Global Knowledge Partnership agreed to an
"action agenda" which included a component linking radio
and ICTs. Groups involved in this initiative include the UN system
agencies (Economic Commission for Africa, International
Telecommunications Union, UNDP, UNFPA and the World Bank),
bilateral agencies (CIDA, IICD and IDRC) and international NGOs
(AMARC, APC, Oneworld, ORBICOM and VITA). The FAO is also a member
of this group and this International Farm Radio Workshop provides
us with an excellent opportunity to move forward with this action
agenda item.
UNESCO was designated the "champion" agency for the
GKP initiative and has begun working to promote community
multimedia telecentres, along the models described above. At a
meeting called by UNESCO in January, Volunteers in Technical
Assistance (VITA – a US NGO) agreed to allocate satellite ground
stations on a priority basis to UNESCO-supported networks of
community radios. VITA's contribution means that the radio
stations without access to telephones will be able to exchange up
to fifty pages per day of email via low-orbit satellites.
Communication with emigrants
While the above initiatives build on expanding the reach of the
Internet through traditional and existing communities, the
configuration and location of communities is also changing,
creating new needs and opportunities. Radio and the Internet can
play a role here, as well.
International migration is both a consequence and a driving
force of globalisation and there are an estimated 75 million
international migrant workers and their dependants in the world
today. Most of these workers retain close ties with the families
and communities in their country of origin and keeping in touch
with family members living outside the country has been identified
as one of the important factors behind the take-up of ICTs in some
developing countries.(14)
More than ten years ago, before the Internet was available in
Mali, emigrants from the Kayes region of Mali living in France
maintained regular contact with Kayes Rural Radio as a way of
getting news from home. When the station faced a sudden financial
crisis brought on, in part, by the sudden loss of donor assistance
from Italy, the support group quickly went to work printing
leaflets and raising money to keep the station going. Working
together with the station, the group also came up with a novel
idea for making money – a fax machine was installed in the
station and the residents in France were able to pay a fee and
have their faxed messages read out over the radio station.(15)
While there has been very little systematic research in this
area, there are a number of examples of local radio stations that webcast
their content, not to reach local audiences, who usually don't
have access to the Internet, but to maintain relations between
local communities and those who have left for political or
economic reasons. Radio Ondas Azuayas(16) in Cuenca,
Ecuador, a country that has seen 10% of its population leave in
the past two years as a result of an economic crisis, directs its
webcasts at Ecuadorians in the USA and Spain. In addition to
informing them of local events, the station also maintains a
voicemail box in the United States. Listeners to the webcasts can
record messages which are then sent to the station as audio files
via the Internet and broadcast over the air. In this way emigrants
can not only listen to the station, but actually participate in
the programming.(17)
Concluding remarks and suggestions for the way forward
Like the ship radio operators in 1906 who were surprised to
hear a human voice over their morse code equipment, rural
inhabitants in some of the remotest parts of the world are now
tapping into the digital world via their radios.
It took only a few years for radio equipment to become standard
on ships and throughout the world – the benefits were easily
recognisable.
The 21st century challenge is to strategize the best
formulation for ensuring the benefits of the Internet reach the
digital deserts, where regular access to information technology
seems unlikely. Digital divide research has highlighted the
imperative of spreading access to information and resources.
Building and improving ICT infrastructure will be an important
element of a strategy aimed at making information available,
but a successful strategy must also focus on ensuring that
information is meaningful within an existing knowledge
infrastructure.
I want to conclude by highlighting three principles that we
might keep in mind during our deliberations over the use
traditional technology – such as radio – in conjunction with
the Internet.
1. Technology is not necessarily the barrier
As we have seen in the examples highlighted in this paper,
technology and access to it need not be understood to be the
significant barrier to participating in an information society.
First, we must not underestimate what can be done when we
combine limited technology with determination and imagination.
ICTs are adaptable and given some resources, people will find a
way to take advantage of synergies and make the technology serve
their communicative needs. Adaptability is the fundamental reason
that radio has been so enduring because it has allowed for
different approaches to its use in terms of range, interactivity
and content and it is this that has enabled it to integrate so
effectively with existing social communication networks and
practices. Radio and Internet projects should be designed to be
scaleable – allowing users (both radio stations and listeners)
to define and refine levels of sophistication and interactivity
depending on the level of access that is available to them.
Second, technology is changing and roll-out of it, even in
remote areas, is becoming easier and more affordable every month.
New technologies for wireless connectivity and increased
investment encouraged by privatisation and liberalisation of
telecommunications infrastructures will go a long way towards
improving Internet connectivity in Africa.
2. Technology is not a panacea
Technology can play an ambiguous role in the pursuit of goals
such as pluralism and decentralisation. The initiatives discussed
in this paper all aimed at promoting these goals, but it is easy
to identify uses for the technology that could efficiently deprive
local communities of their autonomy and limit pluralism on the
airwaves. In the United States, for example, the introduction of
digital satellite technology that enabled relatively low-cost
radio networks was accompanied by a frenzy of purchases that has
seen thousands of independent stations absorbed by a handful of
networks.(18) Formerly independent stations have replaced local
programming with network programming in a move that has limited
the diversity of the nation's radio. The same is happening in many
South American countries. It would be sadly ironic if the
introduction of network technologies led to a situation in which
rural radio once again referred to radio programs produced in the
cities and beamed to the countryside.
3. Next generation rural radio
The injection of the Internet's digital DNA is already changing
the nature of radio and will undoubtedly mean that Next-generation
Rural Radio will be a new species, with a different sound and
a different way of relating to its community. The projects
discussed in this paper offer some insight into what that might be
like, but they represent only the first few steps in the
transformation of the two media. There are tremendous
opportunities for broadcasters but in order to take advantage of
them we will have to experiment and to develop a vision of it that
responds to the distinct needs and desires of our communities.
It has been said that the Internet is a window to the world –
offering a view that includes a wealth of knowledge and
information. Local radio is a mirror that reflects a community's
own knowledge and experience back at it. The convergence of the
two just might offer us the most powerful tool we have yet known
to combine research and reflection to harness knowledge for
development.
NOTES
