From Listener to Radio Prosumer: Management of Audience Participation in the 21st Century Radio

The development of radio in the online environment has changed the relationship the medium has with the audience. Social networks offer listeners-users new ways of participating in the construction of discourse on off radio (on air broadcasting) as well as online. The paper analyzes how broadcasters manage this new proactive role of the audience in broadcast antenna as well as in their profiles on Facebook and Twitter and how listeners-users become generators of content across networks. The methodology is based on a content analysis of the calls for participation made by the broadcaster and the detected audience participation. The results show that the dominant discourse of the 2.0 radio is still the on air broadcasting and controlled by the broadcaster. The audience continues to maintain its traditional role, interacting when the broadcaster requests it and following the guidelines imposed by the radio programme. Even when the interaction takes place in the social networks context, the audience activity is also in line with the hegemonic discourse. The audience shows low level of activity as radio prosumer and very occasionally they present content unrelated to current affairs or the media agenda. Listeners-users are more interested in their ability to amplify radio content among their "friends" and "followers" than to generate and spread their own content under-using the potential that Web 2.0 gives them to be active and to participate.