Jorge Cuéllar
Reconsidering the Radio
in Media Studies
Abstract
This paper highlights current uses of radio to demonstrate its continued relevance to discussions and debates within
media studies. Proclaimed by many as an obsolete medium, radio still finds many uses, such as serving social/grassroots
movements and being instrumental to political struggle and transformation. Now widely accessible, radio is used by
the majority of the world’s population and, for many, functions as a primary source of information that prompts social
activities and political participation. A severe oversight in media scholarship, reconsideration of the uses of radio and
their cultural effects will stimulate understanding of the contemporary configurations of this media technology, both
domestically and abroad. This essay confronts the fact that the history and practices of radio are not the same all over the
world and explores the current state of this oft-forgotten medium in an international scope. Case studies from Brazil,
Mexico, El Salvador, and Ghana raise questions pertaining to the nexus of media, culture, globalization, and political
economy that emerge as central to discussions of the current media moment.
Today, radio exists in the Global North primarily
as a secondary technology to television, films,
and the visual technologies of computers, mobile
phones, etc.1 In some of the “less developed” areas
around the world, radio is still the main media
consumption device in the household, as it is
the most accessible and portable way for people
to remain informed, connected, and included
within global, regional, and local informational
flows. However, radio’s audio-only nature has had
difficulty competing with the multimedia-rich
and interactive user experiences typical of newer
technologies. Given that radio’s golden age in the
US is more or less over, little attention is paid by
researchers to areas in the developing world, such
as Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which continue
to employ radio, with more and more community
projects emerging every day.2 Radio continues
to be central to social building at a fundamental
level. Emergency situations become critical sites
for the resurgence of radio, as seen in cases of the
United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans during
and after Hurricane Katrina; Ham radio operators
during the disasters in Haiti and Chile; and uses
of radio in the recent earthquake-tsunami disaster
in Japan.3 These events highlight uses of radio
that serve the public interest in times of crisis and
systemic failure.4 It constitutes a severe oversight in
media studies scholarship that investigations into
global uses of radio are so few and far between.
Looking toward “global radio” can prove useful in
understanding the complexity of modern media as
well as the different ways people create, consume,
and counteract media messages. Reconsidering
radio is thus necessary to grasp the vacillations in our
media landscape, the emergence of alternative social
cultures, and innovative sonic practices. As Jonathan
Sterne argues, doing so also opens ourselves to
finding “unexpected connections in the audible
present that connect to our audible past.”5 Making
through-lines from history to the present day might
also help us to see how technology can function as a
means of social influence and can, for some, fail and/
or succeed in mediating human activity.
“F” is for Failure
James Crawford and Mike Dillon, editors, Spectator 32:1 (Spring 2012): 37-44.
37
RECONSIDERING THE RADIO
In the United States today, the majority of
exposure to radio comes from online services, such
as Pandora, last.fm, or Spotify, satellite radio, or
downloadable podcasts. Given the range of devices
and platforms on which consumers can access
these services, traditional broadcast radio seems
somewhat of an outmoded technology with little to
no use outside of daily commutes. Institutionally in
the US, radio is used by the military to disseminate
politically conservative, pro-war programming via
the American Forces Networks and its affiliates
worldwide.6 The funding received by organizations
like AFN shows that people all over the world
continue to utilize radio. Traditional radio
broadcasts (commercial and non-commercial)
account for a sizable number of listeners within
the US and is accessed by large sectors of people in
metropolitan areas. This is especially true in centers
with growing numbers of working-class and
immigrant Latinos in addition to communities
surrounding university and college campuses
that rely on radio’s local, cultural, and emergency
services.7 Prior to the growth of television, radio
was once the centerpiece of the household, but as
its novelty eroded and other technologies took its
place, it became relegated to a niche status.
It is necessary here to explore the relationship
communities have to radio to see what makes
groups more likely to turn to radio than to
television and visual media. While the North
American and European contexts are vibrant areas
for study, this essay will explore various present-day
uses of radio outside of these areas to demonstrate
radio’s continued importance as a technology
for actualizing economic, social, cultural, and
political functions. In so doing, I aim to outline the
emerging resistance groups employing outmoded
technology. Forming an alternative geography or
counter-globalization, these resistances are taking
place at the edges of global society and at the
hands of the most oppressed and marginal actors.
Here I employ the conceptual system of “scapes” in
Arjun Appadurai’s theory of cultural globalization,
specifically the technoscape, which describes the
processes of stratification caused by globalization’s
technologies. I hope to approximate that “the
odd distribution of technologies [is] increasingly
driven not by any obvious economies of scale, of
political control, or of market rationality but by
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increasingly complex relationships among money
flows, political possibilities, and the availability
of both un- and highly skilled labor.”8 I will
discuss techno-cultural globalization through the
practices and possibilities radio grants us as both
academics and activists for creative and critical
intervention in the understanding of our current
historical moment. Through three, geographically
distinct examples, I will illustrate radio’s potential
for resistance and subsistence amidst the volatility
of globalization and its effects.
In addition to the routinely transmitting
information such as news, sports, etc., global radio
has operated in other, remarkable ways, such as
aiding guerrilla resistance movements in 1980’s El
Salvador and Nicaragua,9 broadcasting hate radio
in Rwanda in the 1990s,10 and organizing unions
and indigenous media production in Guatemala,
Bolivia, and Ecuador today. Both past and present
uses of radio (not limited to the abovementioned)
have been instrumental in building communities
and developing political and civic participation,
activating and mobilizing diverse sectors of society
toward strengthening democratic institutions.
Its low cost of access has made radio a widely
adoptable tool for different reasons and concerns.
Today’s Global North radio, in its limited and
secondary status, exists as the culmination of
transformations that have made it into a total
and comprehensive commercial medium with
only remote pockets of broadcasting still adhering
to programming in the “public service.”11 For
the International Organization for Community
Broadcasters (French acronym AMARC),
whose goals are to promote the interests of
community radio at the international, national,
local, and neighborhood levels, community radio
is seen as the foundation for the development
of democratic (media) systems. While there are
some community radio outlets that exist in the
United States, as has been documented through
the 1980s emergence of alternative broadcasting
movements like micro-radio,12 these movements
only represent the legislative dimension of the
radio debate within Global North broadcasting.
Despite these movements, radio and its debates in
the Global North have not been at the center of
social and political upheaval, including civil war,
genocide, natural disasters, and so on. In places
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like Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, the
reality is markedly different. Populations in these
regions continue to rely on cheap and accessible
technology like radio to subsist, largely due to a
lack of infrastructure and weak social institutions.13
Radio in Europe, Australia, Japan, and the
United States is largely marginal as a primary
source of news and information for the people.
However, outside of the traditional industrial
centers of the world, radio continues to hold a
place for social and political influence. In Brazil
today, for example, there is an upsurge in the use
of community radio among the growing favela
populations of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.14 The
inhabitants of these shantytowns have, at virtually
no cost, scoured the wastelands of globalization
(largely Global North garbage dumps) to find the
necessary materials to create their own broadcast
systems for their communities.15 Prompted by
the fact that commercial radio around the world
fails to serve their interests, activists and amateur
engineers have worked toward the creation of
community-based projects that serve the needs
and concerns of their real constituent populations,
as opposed to those of the demographics created
by marketers. As Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri,
and others have argued, disenfranchised peoples,
underestimated, humiliated, and oppressed by the
powers that be, seek alternatives (in lifestyle, media
consumption, etc.) to the forms of capital relations
inherent to our current “kind” of globalization.
Radio technology and projects of collectivity
represent a desire for “the open access and sharing
that characterize the use of the common(s),
those which are outside of and inimical to
property relations.”16 The favela populations, the
Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. From Waste Land (Arthouse Films, dir. Lucy Walker and
Karen Harley, 2010).
disenfranchised and forgotten peoples of the
world, are searching here for the common, that is,
a suspension of property relationships amongst
people which have historically undermined
collectivity and collaboration through the
accumulation and privatization of common goods.
Again, a dimension unnoticed by academics and
researchers, the relationships people have with
the radio technology is integral to understanding
strategies employed by communities for navigating
fluctuating economic and social conditions.
Radio, characterized and employed as
a common good, constitutes the creation of
alternative lifestyles to globalization in its current
hegemonic/neoliberal incarnation. As Raymond
Williams writes, “It is in this perspective that
we can reasonably and practically achieve Marx’s
sense of the commune in ‘the production of the
very form of communication,’ in which, with
the ending of the division of labour within the
mode of production of communication itself,
individuals would speak ‘as individuals,’ as integral
human beings” (emphasis mine).17 Crucial to our
understanding of the current media landscape is
that radio, as it is used by people worldwide, opens
media systems up for necessary local-regional
developmental community work that is, for
economic reasons, divorced from the advantages of
new communication technologies. This is the case
because historically, technologies in their potent
and boundless form have advanced the interests
of economic elites, not those of communities.18
Economics is often omitted from media analysis,
despite being a fundamental factor in media’s
creation and ideological construction. As such, what
makes radio effective here is, again, its accessibility,
low cost of participation, and enablement of access
to forms of cultural expression. In this sense, radio
exists as a technology that provides communities
means to resist hegemonic, flattening, and predatory forms of globalization, as demonstrated
by the practices of favela dwellers and, as I will
discuss, the work of activists in Latin America and
small communities in Africa.
While mainstream Third World radio is
heavily commercialized and suffers from formal
ownership concentration (much like the industries
of the Global North ),19 the lack of resources for
independent and regionally-specific media gears
“F” IS FOR FAILURE
39
RECONSIDERING THE RADIO
social actors toward radio production as a viable
source for community building and network
solidification. As Manuel Castells writes, mass
self-communication, that is, the changes brought
on by interactive communication networks like
the Internet, have adapted content consumption
patterns to individuals’ timetables, as opposed to
the one-size-fits-all model of previous broadcast
systems.20 The Internet presents another layer
of financial and resource hardship that many
of those ostracized from society, who may not
even have access to potable water, may be unable
to access. Similarly, Castells concludes that
the growth of mass self-communication is not
confined to the high-end of technology, either.
Grassroots groups are using forms of autonomist
communication strategies, such as low-power,
pirate, and independent production practices
that take advantage of low-cost production and
the distribution capacity of digital formats.21 In
the face of the unequal processes of globalization
and technological development, Portuguese
sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes,
“Social transformation is, from now on, no longer
a political question but a technical question.”22
Revealing a crucial dimension to the efficacy
and influence of technology, Sousa describes
technology as something not to be considered a
zero-sum game wherein some can fail, but as an
intricate fabric of coexisting media ecologies and
global technoscapes.
Accessibility and effectiveness have prompted
many radios to emerge throughout the largely
indigenous areas of Southern Mexico. Looking
to Chiapas as a model for global resistance, these
networks of broadcasters provide information
for the communities of remote Southern Mexico
in their native dialects. Radio and the social
projects around it have served to preserve and
rejuvenate indigenous traditions like language and
customs amidst the cultural distortion and change
“progress” can bring to isolated communities.
Furthermore, as radio continues to function as
a catalyst for the development of indigenous
communities, indigenous peoples have utilized
the resources provided by radio not only to secure
their survival but also to challenge social and state
racism, exclusion from political participation,
etc.23 In this context, radio is particularly suitable
40
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On air with a Zapatista programmer in Chiapas, Mexico. From
Zapatista (Big Noise Films, dir. Benjamin Eichert, Rick Rowley
and Staale Sandberg, 1999).
for the disenfranchised of society who seek
political and civic recognition, as radio’s usability
is implied by its technical characteristics: all you
have to do is listen. Its limitation to sound grants
it immediacy, and its non-exclusive form makes
it compatible with multiple tasks and activities.24
Radio operates to facilitate the linkage of what
Jürgen Habermas calls “instrumental rationality”
(e.g. the modernizing effects of technology within
the public sphere) and the “expressive symbolic”
mentality of communities.25 Interestingly, much
of indigenous radio broadcasting exists away
from the reaches of the Mexican government
and thrives in autonomous, indigenous-led areas
of Mexico. While greater Mexico has shown
heavy concentration of media ownership, radio,
in its communitarian uses, demonstrates a
clear resistance to the knowledge monopoly of
communication technology that seeks to maintain
and expand centralized power.26
In The Bias of Communication, economic
historian Harold Innis notes that serious
challenges to central elite power come from the
margins of society.27 Such is the case with Radio
Victoria, a station located in an impoverished area
of Northern El Salvador that struggles against
problems resulting from globalization. Radio
Victoria is a community project that exists to
serve the families of Cabañas who find themselves
under threat by the Canadian mining company
Pacific Rim Mining. Operating in line with
globalization’s processes of opening up countries to
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transnational economic interests, Pacific Rim seeks
to extract the little remaining metals in the region
at great cost to the environment and human life.28
Cabañas’ residents, in addition to being forcefully
displaced from their lands, are receiving no notice
or financial help whatsoever. These constitute
illegal moves by the Canadian mining company
and the pro-mining Salvadoran elite; it is reported
that Pacific Rim holds counterfeit permits and
falsified anthropological survey work.29 Despite
harassment and violence, including the murder
of one of its founders, Radio Victoria’s project
of activism and resistance continues. This type of
organizing around communication technology
speaks to the possibility of engendering a new
for subsistence living. Faced with rapid climate
change and deteriorating economic conditions, the
residents of Ada have begun to employ radio to
help their communities sell their catches at market
price. A group of broadcasters from the AMARCestablished station Radio Ada are sent into town
to find out the daily market price for fish to better
approximate the price at which people should
sell their perishable goods. In an area extremely
affected by the unpredictability of weather as a
result of climate change, Ada’s limited food sources
are becoming extinct. In this worsening context,
daily problems become exacerbated by the lack of
money and the increase in necessity; communal
and social roles have begun to break down. Radio
functions as one way to quell inflamed social
problems like alcoholism and violence against
women by serving as moderator between groups
and aiding the economic effectiveness of Ada.
While newer technologies such as cell phones
are also in use here, radio continues to demonstrate
its practicality by enabling the community to voice
its problems and concerns to itself via talk shows
and on-air panels.30 Many social mores are helped
by Radio Ada’s involvement in negotiating and
mediating conflicts between men and women in
Radio Victoria 92.1 in Cabañas, El Salvador. Courtesy of Voices
from El Salvador.
civil society, demonstrating the effectiveness
radio technology can have in enabling public
political action. Groups who use radio to resist
the incursion of predatory capital in their spaces
compose a counter-geography that functions on a
different logic and value system and is antithetical
to mainstream understandings of globalization
and the flows of finance and information. As
such, interest should be given to these struggles
and events to encourage the growth of social and
economic justice by calling attention to problems
faced in the Global South.
Radio technology, however, is not used
only to resist governments or the encroachment
of transnational capital. It is also being used
to cope with other effects of globalization,
such as environmental degradation, increased
impoverishment, and social strife. In Ada, a
town in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana,
there exist small communes that rely on fishing
A DJ records his playlist in the Radio Ada studio in Accra, Ghana.
Courtesy of Elizabeth Robinson.
“F” IS FOR FAILURE
41
RECONSIDERING THE RADIO
the village via diverse and engaging programming.
As Kwame Karikari and others have observed,
“[F]orms of media can be popular and facilitate
educational programs of awareness raising,
influence behavior formation, and contribute to
perception change.”31 Community is central for
Ada’s day-to-day functioning, and radio becomes
its primary means for sustaining and meeting the
needs of its members.32 Moreover, technology
and its use is demonstrably not a zero-sum
game. Technologies can and do coexist, are used
interchangeably, and should be studied accordingly.
Failure to consider media as organic environments
overlooks the many ways in which people repurpose
technology to suit their socioeconomic needs.
Radio uses by Ghanaian, Salvadoran,
Mexican, and Brazilian peoples articulate a
decidedly non-Western and self-reliant approach
to communication that employs systems rooted
in and reflective of the socio-cultural attributes
of the community. I believe that (re)considering
radio technology as central to daily experience
can prove fruitful in understanding life through
the vocabulary of the “collective” by researching
how groups can function in social arrangements
outside of the logics of capital accumulation.
Media scholars such as Neil Postman and Cristina
Venegas have proposed studying media and
communication via the complex dimensions of the
territorial geographies of the political, economic,
and cultural interactions that shape the spatial and
ideological contours of media systems.33 Pointing
to variations in linguistic and cultural forms and
thus in media production and consumption, this
perspective is useful for a better understanding
of regional manifestations of media as specific
responses to what de Sousa Santos calls “different
processes of globalization” and to “different and
contradictory globalizations.”34 Thus we can view
radio use as “an organized resistance against the
unequal exchanges produced or intensified by
globalized localisms and localized globalisms.”35
As it is utilized in places in the developing world,
radio reveals that ethno-cultural resistance can
prompt forms of social rebuilding as well as provide
an escape from Global North cultures that tend to
promote individualism, economic irresponsibility,
misinformation, and conspicuous consumption at
all levels of social strata.
Pierre Bourdieu argues in Distinction that any
analysis of culture must begin with an analysis
of necessity.36 The experiences of favela dwellers,
indigenous groups, Salvadoran activists, and
Ghanaian fishing communities speak to important
issues when considering technology’s uses in the
current media landscape. With many different
approaches to academic research in radio, we can
reformulate our thinking about the technology
and its uses, opening up the field to important
research projects that can also inform film,
television, and interactive media. Moving away
from Euro-American analytical frames might
therefore be necessary to help make connections
toward new theoretical and critical avenues of
analysis. Like the slum-dwellers on the outskirts of
Brazil’s metropoles, we need to look toward these
unexpected and counter-intuitive areas to expand
our knowledge of how alternative (techno)cultures
may arise. It remains vital to academic inquiry and
social responsibility to realize the theoretical and
technological discriminations that exist within
the global to recognize and perhaps counteract
what Giorgio Agamben has diagnosed as “the
expropriation and alienation of human sociality
itself.”37 By analyzing media as a part of a global
network of interconnected and interdependent
components, of balances and imbalances, and
of failures and successes, we might reconsider
the radio as an entryway into media ecology
and further our analyses of media as not part
of utopianism but as complex and multifaceted
engines of progress.
Jorge Cuéllar is a second year Master’s student in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California
School of Cinematic Arts. His research interests include the history of cinema in Central America, Latin
American philosophy, political economy of media, globalization, and visual sociology.
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End Notes
1 “Global North” here refers to the industrially advanced nations and regions of the world, such as the United States, Canada,
Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. This is, however, rapidly changing with the economic emergences
of Brazil, India, and China. This term should not be taken as literally geographic but rather as a distinction between sites of wealth
and developedment and underdeveloped areas worldwide.
2 For more on community radio projects, see the homepage for the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters: http://
www.amarc.org/.
3 Rahul Wadke and Richa Mishra, “When Ham radio, social networks provided the connect,” The Hindu Business Line, 12 March,
2011, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/article1532157.ece?homepage=true (accessed 15 March,
2011).
4 Days after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake devastated Haiti in January, 2010, amateur Ham radio operators were busy at work
connecting rescuers within the country and contacting survivors’ families. When a magnitude 8.8 earthquake hit Chile the
next month and the phone network collapsed, a radio operator named Alejandro Jara broadcast the first information from the
ground. Nate Rowan, “Why Ham Radio Endures in a World of Tweets,” Wired.com, 7 February, 2011, http://www.wired.com/
epicenter/2011/02/ham-radio-tweets/ (accessed 10 March, 2011)
5 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 338.
6 For more on The American Forces Network, see US Department of Defense, History of AFRTS: The First 50 Years (Washington
DC: American Forces Information Service and Armed Forces Radio Television Service, 1993) and Patrick Morley “This is the
American Forces Network”: The Anglo-American Battle of the Air Waves in World War II (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2001).
7 See David Hendy, Radio in the Global Age (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2000).
8 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 34.
9 In the 1980s, guerrilla fighters in both Nicaragua and El Salvador employed a decentralized and multi-node broadcasting system
called “roaming radio.” See Carlos Henriquez Consalvi, “The Sky is Taken by Assault,” in Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador,
trans. Charles Leo Nagle V with A.L. (Bill) Prince (Austin: University of Texas Press 2010), 21-25.
10 The two radio stations primarily responsible for inciting violence before and during the 1994 genocide were Radio Rwanda and
Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). See Alan Thompson, The Media and the Rwanda Genocide (Sydney: Pluto Press,
2007).
11 In the US, this is primarily due to ownership concentration after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, then later in 2000.
12 Greg Ruggiero, Microradio and Democracy: (Low) Power to the People (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
13 Despite misconceptions to the contrary, most of the world’s radios do not belong to European or US citizens. Rather, 95 percent
of radio listeners live outside of Europe and the United States. See Claude-Jean Bertrand, “Radio Beyond the Anglo-American
World,” in Radio: The Forgotten Medium (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995).
14 Speaking to this trend is Caldeira’s research that demonstrates favela population growth. In 1970, it held at 1.1% of the
population, but increased to 19.4% by 1993. Quoted in Kelly Hoffman & Miguel Angel Centeno, “The Lopsided Continent:
Inequality in Latin America,” Annual Review of Sociology, 29 (2003), 363-390.
15 Descriptions of and insights into the creation of favela radio creation comes from personal correspondence with Elizabeth
Robinson, Associate Director for Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara and former Treasurer of AMARC.
16 Michael Hardt, “The Common in Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek (London:
Verso Books, 2010), 139. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press
of Harvard University, 2009).
17 Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London
& New York: Verso, 2005), 57.
18 William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004); Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2007).
19 Here, we can point to media moguls like Mexico’s Emilio Azcárraga of Televisa and Boris Esersky of El Salvador’s TCS
(Telecorporacion Salvadoreña).
20 Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 69-70.
21 Autonomist Marxist theory refers to a strand of socialist thought developed by Antonio Negri and others which speaks to
social labor and challenge systems of domination through methods independent of state, unions, or traditional political parties. See
Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, et al., Autonomism: Refusal of Work (Memphis: General Books, LLC, 2010).
22 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Globalizations,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2006), 395.
23 Inés Cornejo Portugal, “La radio indigenista en México,” Intercultural Communication Studies, XIV-3 (2005), 34.
24 Paulina Gutiérrez and Guiselle Munizaga, Radio y cultural popular de masas (Santiago de Chile: CENECA, 1983), 15.
25 Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology” in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Technology
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
26 See Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Innis contends that communication
technology, while unique in historical form, is always intended for achieving social control. He terms the functioning of
communication, in its mode of operation, as constituting a knowledge monopoly.
27 Ibid.
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RECONSIDERING THE RADIO
28 See “Murder in El Salvador Calls Canadian Mining Interests Into Question,” MiningWatch Canada, 20 June, 2011, http://www.
miningwatch.ca/news/murder-el-salvador-calls-canadian-mining-interests-question (accessed 22 June, 2011).
29 For more information on this struggle, see video reports online: “Threats against Radio Victoria,” InterPress Service, July 2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmIVQVJlxOY (accessed 15 March, 2011)., “‘Life is Worth More than Gold’ Say Anti-Mining
Activists” http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41039, 1 February, 2008, (accessed 2 March, 2011) and “Renewed Threats Against
Staff and Journalists of Radio Victoria,” 5 January, 2008, IFEX, http://www.ifex.org/el_salvador/2010/01/05/radio_victoria_
death_threats/ (accessed 2 March, 2011).
30 Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh, “Implications of Globalization for Community Broadcasting in Ghana,” in Community Media:
International Perspectives, ed. Linda K. Fuller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 102-103.
31 Kwame Karikari, “The Development of Community Media in English-speaking West Africa,” in Promoting Community Media
in Africa, ed. S.T. Kwame Boafo (Paris: UNESCO, 2000), 12.
32 For more on Radio Ada as well as current developments in newer technologies, see “Radio Ada, the Voice of Those
Without a Voice,” UNESCO Courier, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=30555&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html (accessed 15 March, 2011) and “Community Radio in Ghana: The Power of Engagement,” 2007, UCLA
Center for Communications and Community, http://www.c3.ucla.edu/research-reports/reports-archive/editors-perspective/
community-radio-in-ghana (accessed 15 March, 2011).
33 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Cristina Venegas, “Thinking
Regionally: Singular in Diversity and Diverse in Unity,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa
Perren (Chichestere, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 120-131.
34 de Sousa Santos, 393.
35 Ibid.
36 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
37 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 79-80.
For more on Radio Ada as well as current developments in newer technologies, see “Radio Ada, the Voice of Those Without a Voice,”
UNESCO Courier, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=30555&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html
(accessed 15 March, 2011) and “Community Radio in Ghana: The Power of Engagement,” 2007, UCLA Center for Communications
and Community, http://www.c3.ucla.edu/research-reports/reports-archive/editors-perspective/ community-radio-in-ghana (accessed
15 March, 2011).
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