Conclusion: Communication as Ritual

5.8 Conclusion: Communication as Ritual

In concluding, we can draw together some of the themes of the thesis by suggesting that the examples cited within this thesis of the convergence of oral history and radio broadcasting occurs most successfully when ‘vernacular authority’ is not negated by ‘institutional authority’. In Chapter 3 we discussed the way in which the histories of popular Newfoundland radio programmes such as The Gerald S. Doyle Bulletin and The Fisheries Broadcast can be characterized by the clash between the institutional protocols of the broadcaster and the vernacular input of the audience. The vernacular often emerges only through institutional mechanisms – alternative voices do not emerge untouched by their means of production, and instead represent evidence of ‘hybrid’ amalgamations of vernacular and institutional expression (as were the humorous or folkloric messages delivered by the Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin). As public folklorist and broadcaster Nicholas R. Spitzer has noted,

As Dagron has observed, such access ‘slots’ are often merely cathartic; they are unthreatening to mainstream media and consolidate the (often false) public image of a broadcasting organisation as democratic and pluralistic (Dagron 2004). However, we should be careful not to assume that all radio phone-in programming provides merely the pretence of access, especially given the Newfoundland (public service radio) example of the Fisheries Broadcast in Chapter 3.3.

Recent research by Podber (Podber 2009) suggests that the use of community radio phone-in forums by Indigenous and Aboriginal people in Australia is often characterised by spontaneity, informality and a blurring of distinctions between the voice of the presenter/gatekeeper and that of the caller/participant. One of his informants, an Aboriginal presenter of a phone-in show, explained how those people who lacked the confidence to participate were represented in the proxy form (as in Newfoundland’s Gerald S. Doyle Bulletin) of messages or ‘shout-outs’:
[Callers] really enjoy making the regular shout-outs…[when] people are too shy to do that, we would take their names….People have got a voice, if they want to use it…And if people want us to use their voice we’ll do it (quoted in Podber 2009).
Podber’s evidence suggests “that the interrelationship of oral tradition and technology has revolutionary potential for social change in Aboriginal communities involved in the creation of community radio” (Podber 2009), as these communities develop methods to combat the non-interactive qualities of the broadcast medium.
Such evidence allows us to gauge how audibly the vernacular can be heard in the institutional context into which it is sublimated (Howard 2008: 205), and to what degree it is subject to and silenced by the machinations of the dominant institution. Howard has identified institutional authority with what Bahktin called the “centripetal force” of monologic discourse (ibid, p. 205) - we can recognize this ‘centripetal force’ as characterizing the early BBC, as it is depicted in Chapter 1. By contrast, the vernacular renders itself meaningful by enacting “centrifugal force”, emphasizing alternatives to the single authority of an institution, opening authority to the heteroglossia of the community (this would apply, for example, to pioneering work within the BBC Regions, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, or paradigmatic changes which occur due to a museum’s work with community partners in a collaborative exhibition, as discussed earlier in this chapter).
Claims at institutional authority press discourse inward toward a single central authorizing agent. In so doing, they limit the heteroglossia characteristic of more dialogic discourse by either assimilating the vernacular into the institutional (as in an official “folk museum”) or by enacting the institutional as superior to the vernacular (as in “great art”…) (Howard 2008: 205-206).
We might apply this theoretical framework to the governmental funding of community radio in the UK as discussed earlier, bearing in mind Innis’ research on the formation of institutions or monopolies (‘the central authorizing agent’), which are accompanied by the emergence of “territorial dependencies” and countervailing forces, creating a shifting balance between centralization and decentralization (Berland 1997: 65).

We may thus be able to negotiate the seemingly intractable opposition between the arguments that a) too great a reliance on government funding may compromise the independence of the sector and b) that the sector has consistently demonstrated its ability to deliver a responsive and localised form of public service broadcasting, and that this should therefore be recognized in terms of adequate governmental funding. Perhaps in assessing the UK community radio sector’s place within New Labour’s ‘community as policy’ framework we can suggest that the existing sector is a hybrid of localized public service and ‘alternative’ community radio broadcasting.

This hybrid identity is more than merely a reflection of the disparities between rural, older and more ‘traditional’ audiences and the younger ethnically and culturally diverse audiences in urban areas. Community radio programming also often reflects more broadly the merging of the commercial or institutional (slick styles of programming which often sound akin to commercial radio but which are, in fact, predicated upon a governmental concern with welfare reform) and the vernacular (the raw voices of the phone-in or oral history interview, which are not an end in themselves but are symptomatic of the aim to provide non-formal life-long education and community inputs at some or all levels). Those who possess ‘vernacular’ (McLaughlin: 1996) knowledge of community radio work to construct vernacular or situated knowledge systems that operate in dialogue with ‘official’ discourses and stipulations (i.e. relating to regulation and licensing) to enact ‘centripetal force’ and open authority to the heteroglossia of the community.
I hope to have offered some possibilities for future research, in the form of this chapter’s case studies, and the different ways of conceptualising the present state and possible future direction of community radio in the UK in this and the previous section. We can now continue to place community radio within the foregoing theoretical structure, and conclude by attempting to address and resolve research questions that have been raised in the course of this thesis. Doing so will allow us to begin to use community media “as a lens to investigate the profound yet enigmatic relationship between communication, culture, and community” (Howley 2002), an approach I have used in previous chapters, to create a social or cultural history of the community uses of regional radio broadcasting in post-war Britain and in Newfoundland.

In order to return to and develop the theoretical issues raised in Chapter 1, surrounding Innis’ notion of the space- and time-bias of communications media, we can apply James W. Carey’s ‘cultural approach to communication’ (1988). Building on Innis’ theories, Carey posited two complementary modes of, or metaphors for, communication - communication as transmission and as ritual (the latter mode was discussed in relation to reception studies in Chapter 3.1). The transmission mode, which is the more common mode, conceives of communication as the distribution of messages in a spatial dimension for the purposes of control (over distance and people).¹⁹⁰ It has the aim of influencing the thoughts and actions of others, which means that it involves a disproportionate relationship of power between sender and receivers, and an uneven distribution of communicative entitlement.

It is also a defining characteristic of the oral tradition, which Innis firmly believed created a fertile climate for democracy. In this way the notions of dispersed cultural production and blurred boundaries between producers and consumers are nothing new. Correspondence between folk culture and digital culture, for example, is important; not least because it counters the ‘short-sighted’ view that oral tradition has or will be wiped out by the computer society (Campanelli 2008). Internet-era concepts can readily be applied to more ‘traditional’ resources or networking activities with which they would not normally be associated; for example, oral history can be regarded as a vital and accessible ‘open source’ (Medosch 2009) (open source most simply refers to any software whose source code is made available for use, modification, and circulation by users or other developers). Similarly, the attitudes shared by contemporary proponents of ‘open source’ (software and applications) are somewhat reminiscent of Innis’ belief in the radical dimension of oral tradition; that it emphasises reciprocity and, in its exponential diffusion, adaptation and re-circulation, defies the control of the state or commerce (and therefore counters the emergence and consolidation of monopolies of knowledge) (Carey 1988: 166).

The links between the modern, decentralized networks of Internet culture and the “network of personal loyalties which oral cultures favor as matrices of communication and as principles of social unity” (Ong, quoted in Rose 2001: 25) are clear. Yet we should be aware of the danger of ‘fetishizing’ either technology or orality (this was an underlying preoccupation of Chapter 4). This thesis has uncovered the historical incidence of the ‘passive’ orality of radio being galvanized and activated through the participation of radio listeners in the ‘proxy’ form of messages conveyed in a wide variety of oral and literate media, such as letters, telegraph messages, magnetic tape recordings, telephone calls (and now e-mails, texts and so on). The early BBC was critiqued in Chapter 1 as a print-based institution that used compulsory scripting and RP to enforce barriers between broadcasters and listeners; yet we have witnessed the use of literate media (letters and telegrams) in Newfoundland to create flexible and participatory forms of radio programming. Therefore, perhaps we should be careful not to understate or overstate the importance of voice or technology, or to overlook the intentionality of broadcasting personnel and the active role of the audience.
This brings us back to the research question - is the democratization of radio possible through the incorporation of citizen participation (the transmission of messages through technological means within radio production), or is it only possible through changing the medium itself through citizen participation in democratic structures of production, management and ownership? My answer, based on the evidence of the thesis, would be that the democratization of radio can occur through both means, but that they represent different levels of participation, and that citizen participation will always be curbed and constrained unless communication and organization are allowed to produce and enact each other.

The key point here relates to the distinction between access and participation in community media (Berrigan 1977; Lewis and Booth 1989; Hochheimer 1993; Barlow 2002); access can be divided into two levels – choice and feedback – which consist of interaction between producers and receivers through regular feedback systems, including participation by the (actual or erstwhile) audience members during programme production or transmission and in the form of a ‘right to reply’. Participation refers to higher levels of production, decision-making, and planning in which citizens can involve themselves, such as management, administration and fund-raising.

We can conceptualise this distinction between access and participation as a distinction between feedback and reciprocity. As Franklin (1999: 42-43) has noted with reference to communications technologies, feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment which exists within a given design. It can improve performance, but it cannot alter this design. Reciprocity, on the other hand, is ‘situationally based’ - it involves responses to a given situation that may lead directly to paradigmatic changes in design. Day’s study of community radio in Ireland, for example, has demonstrated that changes in an organization can occur because “the values and attitudes of those involved are being shaped while they are participating”; each station in her study was found to have altered its management structure as a result of the experience of being on-air (Day 2009: 132), and this is a very common phenomenon in community media.

The technical devices and structures of communications technology have traditionally tended to reduce or eliminate reciprocity, the interactive ‘give and take’ that takes place in face-to-face discussion or transaction. Mass media are typically defined as unidirectional and impersonal communications emerging from a central source to a dispersed and often powerless audience, in contrast to interpersonal communication, which is characterized by two-way face-to-face communication by co-present actors (see Appendix D) (Purcell 1997: 101). As Kristen Purcell has observed, these are unquestionably useful heuristic tools, providing an analytical framework by which communication in many settings can be conceptualized; “yet their conceptual ability is undermined by the tendency to historicize the ideal type relationship” (Purcell, ibid.). Mass media and interpersonal communication need, then, to be removed from a linear historical context, and placed in a continuum or a dialectical framework. The opposing categories which have been discussed throughout this thesis – time and space; orality and literacy; folklore and popular culture; ritual and transmission; the vernacular and the institutional; interpersonal communication and mass media - challenge and transform one another in an uneven and evolutionary development, the resulting tensions producing new, composite forms of interaction or syncretism (Purcell 1997: 102).

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Notes