Exciting Future for Radio Everywhere

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Sunday June 19, 2005 09:28 by RobbieSaoririseoir - Indyradio Network seorobbie at yahoo dot ie 17 Mountshannon Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8 01-4547424

Rebuilding Radio along the lines of a non-hierarchical Communitarian Model

Reclaim our Media III (and following on from thread at http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=70101&search_text=velo%20city


As the printing press faciliitated the Reformation, ‘Informaation Technology’ and open publishing are enabling a progression of the trend away from authoritarian structures and the mass-illusion of powerlessness.

Indyradio is an attempt to combine community radio and indymedia, and its implications for everyday listening and understanding are potentially amazing.

The advent of a new roots-up model in broadcasting has profound implications for how we see ourselves and others, and radio will be at the vanguard of this revolution. Each media type has its good points, but for low-cost accessibility to broadcasting the potential for radio is enormously untapped in the digital context. Such infrastructure should be invested in by the state, but we we’ve an anti-statist government, and can’t afford to wait: the big players are already tyring to turn this fresh coomon domain into a means of fleecing us.

With traditional radio, licensing and allocation of frequencies has always been an elitist affair – the same names and companies taking up most of our radio air-space. We suffer and have choice removed, as they race to the bottom for the lowest, commercial, homogeonous denominator (the 15-35 zombie).

Currently, pod-casting is taking off in Britain, and it can’t be long before Irish commercial stations try to get in on the act. Indymedia however, have been at it since Daithí Mac Sithigh’s report on March 9th, 2002, and have archived 38 other podcasts since – just type .mp3 into search…

Broadnabd, combined with Y-fi or 3g technology, will mean that web radio can be picked up anytime, anywhere.

www.skype.com allows free audio communication throughout the world.

All that is needed is a recorder (minidisc or better), broadband to upload the .mp3 file, server space to store the data, and perhaps, to come, an interface to make it easier for listeners to navigate the ‘programmes’ and to lsten at work or at home, with the least possible effort.

There’s no point in too much theorizing: unpredictably, needs arise and situations evolve out of practice. This is just a brief sketch of what seems to be happening.

Perhaps a network would be a good idea, so that technical info could be shared, and resources could be spread (that two people don’t record the same event and miss another one as a result etc.).