ABSTRACT
The medium of radio, just like any other media form, has seen different forms of transformation in Africa. These transformations have occurred both in the policies governing the use of media as well as in the technologies that produce them and make them available to their audiences. In the process of doing this, most media consumers or what is generally known as the audience have also mutated from passive receivers of media content to become active participants and more interestingly producers of content that keeps each medium going. As we move from the understanding of media as a phenomenon directed at a unified audience to the appreciation of the diversity of different publics at which media messages are directed, it becomes important to view audience as a form of problematised entity whose practices of reception dwell both in the technological presence of a particular medium coupled with the social context in which individuals or groups of receivers attempt to use media messages. As scholars like Lawrence Grossberg, Debra Spitulnik and others have observed, both technology and social context determine the reading of media texts or the reception of messages sent out through the media (Grossberg 1987; Spitulnik 2002). Though questions of ‘the economics of ownership’ (Spitulnik 2002: 340) are important in understanding the level of access which different people have to media, there is a broader sense in which this economical question also relates to the kind of social relations, and by extension power relations that exist simultaneously with media technologies in each society.
