IMPACT OF RADIO IN PROPAGATING CULTURE

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0       Background to the Study

Radio is one to the mass media that ensure the promotion of culture in every society. It tends to broadcast the way in which society, nation, community or family live their life, and how people relate with one another. Cultural promotion is one of the basic functions of mass media, where people tend to learn and share their culture with vast majority of audience, nations, communities and societies. This tends to contributes positively to the lives of citizens in a specific nation/society (Okunna, 2003).

Cultural promotion in a society is a basic role of mass media, especially radio. The accessibility of radio by the audience makes radio to be one of the basic mass media channel for cultural promotion (Okunna, 2003). Radio at the grassroots level is widely held as an important medium in promoting culture. Radio is one of the oldest forms of mass media. It serves as an instrument of struggle in the search for liberty and social promotion. Due to easy accessibility to radio; especially the community radio by those at the grassroots, it has become a very effective tool in societal development via culture. (Schramm, 1964) in (Daramola, 2003).

Radio as the name suggests is an electronic device that transmits sound from a particular source to the receiver.  Ajayi (2006) assert that:

Radio is primarily a sound medium. Whether you want to inform your listeners about what is happening at home and around the world, to persuade them to purchase or try a product or entertain them with music or drama, all are conveyed by sound to the listeners on radio. Sounds are simply the raw material of radio and consists of periodic waves created by vibrating objects such as musical instruments, loudspeakers or the human voice.

This helps us to understand that radio basically deals with audio or sound to convey information of whatever kind to the listenership of people, may be an individual, group and/or to massive number of people.

In all of these explanations about radio, what we must narrow our attention to in this study is its impact or effect on people culture-wise. As it is important that we know what is radio and how it operates, so it is important to know how it affects our emotions, our life style and the most of all, our actions. One of the functions of media to the society is cultural transmission. Otite and Ogionwo (2006) posits that “In scientific usage, culture is often defined in blanket terms as the total way of life of people”. This simply suggests that we are what we are as a people by the dictates of our culture, because it conveys what we acquire as human beings in ways such as knowledge, traditions, morals, customs, ritual, beliefs, art etc., which are shared and transmitted from generation to generation (Otite and Ogionwo, 2006).

For ease of analysis, the variants of the interpretations of culture can be taxonomized into two (2) distinct categories based on their ideological orientations, which are the idealist and materialist views of culture. The idealist perspective sees culture as being determined by ideas, values and beliefs. This perception apprehends culture as a heritage which transcends time and space and may be described as an ontological variety. For this perspective, culture is inert and changeless. On the other hand, the material view of culture perceives it as a historical product of a specific people at a particular time and space. From this tangent, culture undergoes mutation as the society that produces its transformations. For the materialist perspective, what determines a cultural or social phenomenon is the interaction between human beings and their material conditions and modes of production.