Twitter or Radio Revolutions? The Central Role of Açık Radyo in the Gezi Protests of 2013

Radio has been employed as a communication tool during all the social movements and protests of the last decades of the past century, from the student movements of May 1968 in Paris and Mexico City to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, while the political protests and uprisings at the beginning of the twenty-first century have mostly been supported by social media (Howard and Hussain, 2013). Is Twitter the radio of the twenty-first century? Another, more complex, reality lies beyond the surface of the representation of the protests shaped by the mainstream media: the mediascape in which political movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Indignados have emerged is a mixed one, a mediascape where old and new, mainstream and underground media co-exist, interact and shape each other. In this paper, we will focus on the case of Açık Radyo, the only independent and listener-supported radio station based in Istanbul, and the role it played in the Gezi Park protests of June 2013. This study is based on an ethnographic investigation undertaken between December 2014 and January 2015 that used a mix of participant observation (Spradley, 1980) and in-depth interviews (Patton, 2001) with 15 Açık Radyo workers and volunteers and 10 Açık Radyo listeners. We will show how radio has not lost the value that it gained as a tool for political and social change during the twentieth century, but how it has only repositioned itself within the changing digital mediascape of the twenty-first century, mixing itself with social media in order to continue amplifying radical political discourses and networking protesters together

Radio formats and social media use in Europe - 28 case studies of public service practice

The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: Programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use innovative radio language or are youthoriented productions. The survey has been carried out by a team of ten European researchers from seven countries on a sample of 28 public radio programmes analysed for two months between January and February 2011. The research team attempted to answer the empirical question: 'How social media are used by public service?'. Are there some common threads and shared practices among successful programmes in different countries? The team adopted an empirical approach based on social media content analysis and interviews with radio producers. This article will present the main results of this empirical research project. It will conclude with practical guidelines for public radio production and social media innovation

Sentirsi a casa ai tempi di Facebook

Il mantenimento degli affetti a lunga distanza è passato attraverso mezzi differenti, cambiando forma e frequenza, ma non sostanza. I social media si vanno a sommare a tutti i media precedenti e amplificano l’effetto di riduzione delle distanze

Doing radio in the age of Facebook

This article begins with the hypothesis that social media are the prosecution of radio by other means; its aim will be to focus on the changes that radio has undergone since it started to mix with social media, in particular Facebook (FB). How deeply have such changes affected the relationship between radio producers and listeners? The article will analyse the cases of three Italian radio programmes that have developed an intense interaction with their listeners through FB. It will report on quantitative observation of the social media activity of these programmes over an entire week and show the different social media strategies implemented by the selected programmes, as well as their different dramaturgical relations with the listeners