Introduction

The Commons

A final concept I find useful in theorizing the relational dimensions and practices of community radio is the notion of the commons. In 1982, Marvin S. Soroos wrote about radio as the commons in the sky, natural resources held based on tradition and treaty with many of the same management issues as other resources but different relationships to the idea of depletion. It is not a depletable common pool good in the same way as water and arable land, as Soroos notes. Even so, the radio spectrum has limited space for signals before interference begins to take place. Dividing up the spectrum are policies and marketplaces that vary from nation to nation, making management difficult. A 2011 issue of the International Journal of the Commons features three pieces comprising a special section dedicated to understanding radio through a commons framework as often associated with Elinor Ostrom, Victor Ostrom, and the Bloomington school of political economy. In an introductory editorial, Erling Berge and Eda Kranakis describe the atmospheric spectrum of radio frequencies as a technology-dependent commons. Extending the commons model, Nina Wormbs applies Elinor Ostrom’s eight design principles of commons management to a historical case study of European broadcasting in the 1920s, arguing for this framework in radio spectrum strategizing. Finally, Christian Henrich-Franke examines the politics of Cold War era broadcasting and finds informal social networks to be perhaps as important in successful radio management as official policy. This is perhaps the most insightful point in the section. While the Ostrom commons design principles are in many ways in line with how radio is currently regulated, they offer little beyond addressing allocation and theoretical rules for internal management. Henrich-Franke engages with radio commons in practice, and in doing so illuminates the importance of exchanges outside of top-down organization.

WFHB, like many community radio stations in the United States, works within the top-down systems of federal regulation and frequency allocation; if it did not, it would lose the license to its frequencies and those frequencies would likely be quickly allocated to another station. When two operations too close together geographically attempt to broadcast on the same frequency, it causes interference that makes both signals inaudible. In such a case, only a licensed station would have the legal right to complain to a regulating body and regain its clarity. The radio spectrum is thus not set up to be shared like a common pool resource, even though it is technically possible to do so, albeit with sonically muddy results. Perhaps more productive is to understand how WFHB participants use the frequencies they have been allocated—and the assemblage therewith—as a commons in itself. Such a commons is, in the words of José Esteban Muñoz, “never placid. Life in the commons is and should be turbulent, not only because of the various enclosures that attempt to overwhelm a commons, but also because disagreement within the commons—what Jacques Rancière would call dissensus—is of vital importance to the augmentation of the insurrectionist promise of the commons” (2020, 4).

In my experience, there is no shortage of possibilities for disagreement between actors (programmer and listener alike) within the community radio commons. It is perhaps even ideal for a station to receive differing ideas in learning what its community wants in order to continue to describe itself as community media. The commons model thus fits well in the sense that it emphasizes multivocality.

Community radio is an inherently participatory mode of communication with organizational ideologies that guide its sociality. What results is phenomenally expansive and interconnected. Scapes, assemblages, complex adaptive systems, and commons are all capacious social models well suited to in-depth studies of the medium. I find each one productive as a perspective on community radio that underscores dynamic relationality and possibilities for emergence. The scape’s emphasis on worldbuilding and global movements makes it a useful approach for understanding community radio as embedded in a larger bundle of cultural forces. Assemblage thinking lends itself well to analyzing pieces of the community radio world in relation to each other rather than in isolation. Complex adaptive systems theory explores how experience informs shifts in community radio dynamics that, sometimes unpredictably, inform shifts in community radio’s impact at a given time and place. Finally, understanding community radio as a kind of commons opens it up to analysis of on-air and off-air performances of belonging in this sonic situation. These are tools for researching community radio not just as object or site but as system, a necessary orientation for deep analysis.