Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the BBC website, as do the programmes on the other BBC stations.
In most cases these contain little more than information about the
programme. But, in the case of Radio 1 at least, the Web pages offer
much more. They are integral parts of the experience at a number
of levels. Many of the programmes operate webcams that allow
listeners who also have access to the Web at the time to look at live
streaming video of the disc jockeys and their production teams.
The Web pages have another use that is perhaps more radical in its
implications for the transformations of media, even as it appears
quite banal. Listeners are often encouraged to upload images of
themselves onto the website, which are then visible to other listeners/
viewers. Increasingly such uploading can be achieved without access
to a computer. Anybody with a 3G-enabled mobile camera phone
can do so either through a multimedia message or through email
(though the latter is more complicated). Mobile phones are also
used by listeners to participate in other ways, for example to text in
a vote whether, according to the image they have uploaded, a partic-
ular listener is good looking or not. (This kind of participatory,
multimedia broadcasting is a long way from the paternal vision of
the BBC promulgated by its original Director General, Lord Reith.)
The situation gets more complicated when one factors in the
fansites that have no official connection to the shows or persona-
lities with which they are concerned, but those working on the show
are clearly aware of them. Of course radio of all sorts has always
involved participation, in the form of listener requests, phone-ins
and so on.
It would also be a mistake to suggest that increased possibilities
of audience participation represent some kind of new participatory
democratisation of conventional mass media, of the sort suggested
by Post-Marxist theorists of the 1960s such as Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, for whom any transmitter is also, in principle, a
receiver. For all the appearance of encouraging audience participa-
tion, radio stations such as the BBC are still organizations dedicated
