culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

CREATING ALTERNATIVES.
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
clear-cut promise: “In a right-wing government, there will be no monopoly in
radio and television”. This was obviously not true. In 1977 the commission
handed in their report, suggesting no true changes in the Swedish public service
system (Forsman 1999). But one. In 1979 community radio was introduced in
Sweden. It is a low powered FM radio, without commercial content, and where
permission to broadcast was given solely to popular movements. This, openly
recognized or not, was something that the pirates of the 70s was at least partly
responsible for.
Again, we could speak of society’s response to radio pirating in terms of
co-optation: the introduction of community radio would of course be an attempt
to domesticate the subversive forces of commercial radio and to harness it under
the ideologies of the present media landscape. Again, also, it was not the forces
of the market that assimilated the resistance but the government. But instead of,
as was the order in the 1960’s, evict the pirates and textually remodel public
service radio, the strategy was to recognize the creativity of pirate radio
production and to compel it to adjust itself to the Swedish tradition of popular
movements.
A Pyrrhic victory? 1980-1993
During the 1980s the new community radio became the forum for the
former pirates. These community radios had to be non-commercial and only
associations concerned mainly in other things than broadcasting were allowed to
have time on the air. This meant that radio enthusiasts all over Sweden joined
political parties, sports associations et cetera in order to be able to broadcast and
that things like ‘culture’ or ‘youth associations’ were formed, seemingly with
other main objectives than radio. Interpreted through the concept of citizen’s
media (Rodriguez 2001) – where social capital accumulated through individual
engagements in media projects, e.g. radio programming is transformed into an
active citizenship – this development could be understood as a civic
empowerment. But in reality most of them were there to give music radio to the
people.
The transmitters were weak and frequencies were put in odd places on the
FM-scale, the multitude of associations broadcasting (religious groups and
ethnic minorities for example) made it hard to keep any consistency in
programming and content. This was naturally the pluralistic and democratic idea
behind the Swedish community radio reform. But nevertheless the prerequisites
for this type of radio could also be seen as a way of disarming its revolutionary
potentiality; to make it hard for the former pirates and others wanting true
reform to reach an audience. The community radio started to look like a pyrrhic
victory. Or, with the words of Herbert Marcuse: as a part of a repressive
tolerance (1965), where the resistance was offered a safe zone, a harbor where
the dangerous voices could be quieted through letting them be heard. The
establishment’s response could be described as turning alternative media into
community media. Interestingly, this does not mark the end of alternative radio
in Sweden. Pirating enthusiasts found new creative ways to challenge a media
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