(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication Osaka, Japan
economic ability, are further pushed to the margins in this ratings war by both the
commercial and the public service media.
In such a media situation, community media, whether representing a geographic
community or a community of interest, or both, provide marginalized people an
opportunity to promote their own point of view. Within the normative media
discourse, it is media that create audiences and then sells the numbers and figures to
advertisers to generate revenue.
But in the context of the community media, it is the people (audience) who create
their media. In the latter framework, the use of medium is more contextual to reflect
the living experiences of those marginalized by the commercialized, standardized and
westernized content of the distanced, vertical and highly structured mass media.
Radio Ramzan provided a voice, both in reality and symbolically to help people to
propagate and validate their own knowledge and worldviews. The communicative
interaction facilitated by this radio station in practice is described by critical scholars
as ‘participation through media’ for self-representation in the public spheres for
collective decision making (Couldry, 2003). Symbolically, the radio provided a
‘frame of reference’ to belong, to share and to celebrate what is common in a highly
fragmented and changing world (Hollander and Stappers,1992).
It would be, however, wrong to suggest that the radio station had solutions to all the
issues and problems faced by the members of excluded communities in Nottingham.
Radio Ramzan was a time-bound experiment which exhibited its potential in
generating alternative voices but, at the same time, revealed a number of deficiencies
in this project including the gendered nature of the station, the dominance of religious
elite and the divisions and difference of opinions within the community itself.
But in the absence of a radio station these feelings and contestations would have
remained out of the public debate. The community-based project, specifically, cannot
claim to have the complete involvement of all people or give representation to all
shades of opinion all the time. To make such a claim will be misleading. Radio
Ramzan, as has been stated in the introduction to this thesis, emerged against the
backdrop of a number of conflicting realities and multiplicities on the one hand, and
the common experiences of marginalisation and discrimination on the other.
The radio station, in fact, reconciled through some of these multiplicities using the
process of dialogic communication. The project has helped to conceptualise the role
of small-scale faith based media in facilitating the participation of disadvantaged
groups in collective action through communication, reflection and action. The social
gain value of such media can be gauged from the fact that while transnational media
like CNN, BBC and Hollywood create mainstream audiences for their popular genres
of news and entertainment, at the local/communal level people create their own media
to help them engage in interactions relevant to their day to day life.
588