Os jovens, a rádio e os meios asociais...

«Radio, in other words, is being used by teenagers as an escape route from family life and into what is described as the 'privatism' being sought for at a particular moment in their psychological and social development. This chimes with the observation by Barnett and Morrison that for all of us: «Television has become the 'social' medium, allowing the family to share a leisure activity in its own living room; radio, on the other hand, has become 'asocial' - a solo medium which is isolationist rather than communal. (1989: I). There are two important caveats to this casting of radio listening as somehow more 'private' or 'asocial' than watching television: first, it underplays the changing relationship between the way we use various media in the home, and secondly, it underplays the sociable dimensions of radio listening itself... First, then, the question of competing media in the home. In the years since Barnett and Morrison made their observation the number of television sets per household has risen considerably throughout the western world. Specifically, many teenagers are now just as likely to have a TV set in their bedrooms as a radio. (...) At the same time teenagers are no longer quite so dependent as they once were on the transistor radio as their means of withdrawal from the family: the better off among them are now likely to have their own CD players, computer games, even Internet access. These offer entry to a whole range of 'asocial' activities other than radio, and their presence in households appears to be making teenagers more discriminating - sceptical even - about the radio output on offer (Carroll et al. 1993)» (Hendy, 200: 127-1289)