ABSTRACT

The ‘community’ of community media has long been a contentious question in the field. Given the wide range of interpretations of community and the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences, it has never been more important for community media to define and delineate their audiences. One approach to this is developing and maintaining a sense of mediatized community identity through content production. Community identity represents an under-researched area in community media studies. While community media audiences and broadcasters have themselves been the subject of research, how a sense of community identity is created through content production is less understood. This article details a critical discourse analysis of programming from ten different community radio stations within the same geographic location. The findings of this research reveal the very different approaches that stations take to developing a mediatized community identity. Several stations approach identity expression by engaging in overt performances of ‘localness’, while the growing influence of commercialization was also observed among many stations. What this research highlights is that the performance of community identity on community radio is integral in shaping the listening communities, as well as delineating community radio from its commercial and state-run counterparts.

摘要

社区媒体的“社区”长期以来一直是该领域的一个有争议的问题。鉴于对社区的广泛解释和媒体受众的持续碎片化，社区媒体定义和描绘其受众从未像现在这样重要。解决这个问题的一种方法是通过内容制作来发展和维持一种媒介化的社区认同感。社区身份代表了社区媒体研究中一个研究不足的领域。虽然社区媒体受众和广播公司本身一直是研究的主题，但人们对如何通过内容生产创造社区认同感却知之甚少。本文详细介绍了对同一地理位置内十个不同社区广播电台节目的批判性话语分析。这项研究的结果揭示了电台在发展媒介化社区身份方面所采取的非常不同的方法。一些电台通过公开表现“地方性”来表达身份，同时在许多电台中也观察到商业化的影响越来越大。这项研究强调的是，社区广播中社区身份的表现对于塑造收听社区以及将社区广播与其商业和国营同行区分开来是不可或缺的。