2.2.5. Understanding the role of community media in
local development
Milan, Stefania(2009) argued that community media add to the
social and cultural dimensions of development by providing channels for
participation, social and political empowerment, and the exercise of citizen
rights, as they work for community building by transforming individual
experiences in a shared vision of (a better) reality.
According to Hollander et al. (2002), community media provide
public communication (made available to everyone) within a specific context:
the community, understood not only as a geographical setting but primarily as a
social setting. Community media are devoted to the `reproduction and
representation of common (shared) interests', and `the community serves as a
frame of reference for a shared interpretation'.
Emphasis is on the symbolic experience or the transformation
of `private individual experience into public collective experience' (Hollander
et al. 2002: 26). This is, I believe, where one of the main contributions of
community media to development lies: in the making or reinforcing of social
ties as the symbolic basis for change. The message is that `together we can
make it': in this sense, community media offer marginalised communities a means
for empowerment.
For poor communities, because of costs and accessibility:
radio transmitters are cheap, easy to use for illiterate people and where
landlines and the Internet are still a mirage. The case studies provided in
this paper concentrate on radio as the media catalysing the widest concern
among policy makers and advocacy groups for its relevance in developing
countries. In the effort to find a policy-operative definition that could be
taken for active consideration by policy makers, community-media advocates have
reframed the concept in many ways (Milan, Stefania, 2009).
For Girard, community radio `aims not only to participate in
the life of the community, but also to allow the community to participate in
the life of the station . . . at the level of ownership, programming,
management, direction and financing' (Girard 1992: 13). But if participation is
multi-level, emphasis is especially on dialogue and communication as a two-way
process (Carpentier et al. 2003). Offor (2002) argues that, to promote social
and cultural change, community radio needs to be not only a channel to transmit
to people, but also a means of receiving from them: not only an instrument to
hear from or about the world, but the people's voice, to make their voice
heard.
Community media cover diverse topics, but often they embrace
what can be called a `social mission'. For example, an educational focus
characterises many stations in Africa: health- and childcare programs, farming
tips, human and women's rights, literacy classes. Their impact is more relevant
when programs are created by the community for the community (Milan, Stefania,
2009).
Community radio can play a vital role in development and
democratization by enabling communities to articulate their experiences and
critically to examine issues, processes and policies affecting lives (Bonim and
Opoku-Mensah, 1998 p18).
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