Gestión de cobros y pagos en la actividad del transporte

Community media is described in a variety of ways. Among them, ‘alternative media’, ‘radical media’, ‘citizen’s media’, ‘grassroots media’, ‘participatory media’ ‘tactical media’ and ‘community-based media’. As Howley notes, given this variety of names by which the community media is known, it lacks a “definitional precision” (Howley, 2010:15) and being an “on-going process” to which “nobody has a manual for it, a how to recipe” it becomes much harder to give a precise definition (Dagron, 2004:46).

As mentioned above, just as community media lacked a “definitional precision”, community media also has a short research history. The main motivation that led to an increase in community media research was attributed to the UNESCO debates of the 1970s that were centred around the unequal flow of information between developed and developing worlds which lead to the birth of (what was known as) NWICO, the New World Communication and Information Order (Rodriguez, 2001). As Rennie (2006) notes, the NWICO debates were the trigger that activated academic interest, subsequently addressing the ‘shortfall’ in the study of community media (Rennie, 2006:16). Zhao and Hackett (2005) describe the

NWICO debates and their aftermath as the first wave of world media democratisation, some of the other waves being the “drive for public voices participatory communication on the part of the social movements” and the power of the Internet which has a global affect on media democratisation unfolding a “new era for alternative media” (Zhao and Hackett, 2005:15- 16).

Important academic work that has come out in the process of theorising community media includes, Downing’s theorisation of alternative media as radical media, linking it as a tool of the social movements. His theory highlights alternative media as a means of community mobilisation and grassroots participatory communication that are aimed at bringing radical transformations (Downing, 2001). In many respects, Downing’s theory emphasises the power of collective communication and participation in media through social movements. In this regard, the theory is also a discussion of broader aspects of alternative media as a powerful force of democratic communication and media democratisation.

The use of alternative media as a tool of the social movements which are collective bodies, however, limits alternative media use by others. For example, alternative media can be also used by individuals who use their own Internet blogs to express their radical views and calls towards bringing radical changes. Although these are also “weaker forms of alternative media”, they too have the capability to act as media outlets that could bring radical change (Atton, 2002:21). For example, on the recent world stage, we have seen that rather than through social movements, it was the use of social network sites such as facebook, Twitter, instant messaging through mobile phones or using Internet blogs by ordinary individuals that led to mass mobilisation and eventually to the formation of social movements that mobilised people powerful enough to bring down the rule of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in Egypt in 2011. In the case of Egypt, it was widely regarded that an individual blogger by the name of Abdul El Fattah was responsible for the initial mass mobilisation (Aljazeera, 2011). This showed that just as alternative media created social movements, even a single person using a single medium such as one’s own personal Internet facebook page could also be effectively used to bring social mobilisation and later, the formation of more organised social

movements leading to radical change.

Besides Downing, the theoretical discussion in this chapter also highlights how Rodriguez (2001) has shown the effects of media democratisation within small cultural communities. For Rodriguez community media is not an alternative that is there for use of the powerless and the marginalised who are left out by the mainstream media. According to Rodriguez, such descriptions “will easily entrap us in binary thinking: mainstream media and their alternative” (Rodriguez, 2001:20)…and “blinds our understanding of all other instances of change and transformation brought about by these media” (Rodriguez, 2001:20).

Rodriguez shows how small communities use citizens’ media to reaffirm their citizenship (within them) at their own pace, strength and taste and hence being alternative to none. In many ways, citizens’ media theory is “the most in-depth attempt to understand self- representation” bringing “community media into contemporary thinking about power, citizenship and media use” (Rennie. 2006:188). “Rodriguez’s shift to “citizens’ media” does not remove the themes that have always been the focus of alternative media: protest and dissent, collective organisation and participation, culture and the media, viewing and producing” (Rennie, 2006:21).

The third and the final part of this chapter focuses on theorising community radio. Defining community radio, Coyer (2007) states:

there is no one definition of community radio; however, it is generally understood to encompass stations that embrace participatory, open, not-for-profit practices, and made by and for the community primarily by voluntary labour values. It is a source of local, neighborhood-based news, entertainment and information. It is radio run for its own sake, for the benefit of the community, rather than for the profit of station owners (Coyer, 2007:113).

organising and social engagement” (Coyer, 2007:113). Girard (1992) describes community radio as a “radio that encourages expression and participation and that values local culture. Its purpose is to give a voice to those without voices, the marginalised groups and to the communities far from large urban centres, where the population is too small to attract commercial or large-scale state radio” (Girard, 1992:ix).

The community radio is described as an alternative to the mainstream media which are “geared towards homogeneous audiences…and carrying dominant discourses and representations” (Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier, 2008:18) and hence, sidelines the interests of the smaller communities and other minorities whose interests could not be taken on board. The community radio is mostly distinguished as the radio that is committed “to community participation at all levels” and where “community radio listeners are the producers, managers, directors and even owners of the stations” (Girard, 1992:2, Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier 2008:23). An important feature that is attributed to community radio is its ability as a means for community mobilisation and radical change as much as it is a channel for celebrating community life. In the developing world, the use of community radio for development communication purpose is an important feature. It is believed that “community-based participatory media in a variety of forms provide substantial hope that people can best make decisions affecting their own futures if provided the contexts within which to establish media for themselves to address their own problems as they construct them” (Hochheimer, 2002:319); the purpose being to help establish a two-way communication process enabling “specific bottom-up solutions” (Rennie, 2006:134) to community issues.

This chapter, in particular, has discussed the different characteristics of community radio; and notes community access and participation as the two defining characteristics that are mostly associated with community radio (Jankowski and Prehn, 2002:11). As much of this study is centred on community access and participation in the selected three radio stations, the theoretical discussion on access and participation in this chapter, in many ways, lays the theoretical foundation for my study. Hence, in the subsequent chapters, I have developed this

theme at varying levels. For example, in Chapter Six, I investigate the nature of access and participation as they are practised within the three cases I have chosen for this study. In Chapter Seven, I have done a content analysis of news of the three selected cases to explore the frequency as well as the nature of community news and events getting access to radio news bulletins. In Chapter Eight, I discuss the role of the Internet as the new future for community radio in providing a new pathway for communities, especially for the new generation youth, to access and participate in their community radio.