Passivos ou não

Para Cordeiro (2007: 57), foi Lazarsfeld quem ajudou a contrariar «a ideia de passividade dos consumidores e omnipotência da comunicação».

MORRISON, David E. (2001), «The historical development of empirical social research», em Graham Roberts e Philip M. Taylor (eds), The historian, television and television history. Luton: University of Luton Press, 9-23

Alô Marktest...

In a story with resonance to those of us in radio, Nielsen has announced that it is dumping its phone-based sample for its paper diary samples, and is transitioning to a system that uses addresses instead.

Why?  Because of the swift decline of TV homes provided by the landline telephone sample frame.  Nielsen indicates that it only covers about 75% of households in their diary markets.  They also report that this problem is especially prevalent in homes where the family head is 35 or younger.

We've seen this data before - every year in the Jacobs Media Technology Poll.  First, Gallup, now Nielsen.  And of course with PPM.  As we predicted several years ago when this problem first came to light, the "Cellphone Only" dilemma impacts every researcher and marketer who conducts telephone interviews and promotions - from callout to perceptual studies to telemarketing.

Stations should definitely be asking these questions the next time your station commissions new research or buys an audience promotion that utilizes the telephone. » Jacoblog

A rádio não quis os ouvintes

Há décadas têm os ouvintes essa possibilidade, mas a interactividade fica ainda absolutamente restringida pelo próprio conceito de programação que constituiu a história do rádio. Ou seja, a participação é permitida e controlada. Mantém os receptores em sua condição. E submetidos a regras de linguagem. De temas e tempo», escreve Salomão Mohazir (Zuculoto, 2005: 55)

O que Lazarsfeld estudou

«Paul LAZARSFELD, que estudou os feitos da rádio na década de 40 nos Estados Unidos, sublinhou que seus efeitos reais e potenciais deveriam ser estudados em duas direções: “Primeiro, deve analisar-se quem escuta o que e porque. Depois, mas só depois, terá sentido estudar-se as modificações provocadas peja rádio nas pessoas que o escutam”. Observou também que as condições dessa escuta eram determinantes (cit. in Wolf, 1985:32). A forma como a informação da rádio participa da construção social da realidade passa pela resposta a estas questões» (Meditsch, 1999: 219).

WOLF, Mauro Teorias da Comunicação. Lisboa, Presença, 1987  

A Internet foi o primeiro meio a surgir sem ser suportado por publicidade

«This is the first mass marketing medium ever that isn't supported by ads. If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn't please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.That's the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers. But the Net is different. It wasn't invented by business people, and it doesn't exist to help your company make money»

Godin, Seth, The web doesn't care Seth Godin's blog, 21/07/08

A internet adapta-se bem à rádio de palavra?

The Internet is the future of radio, and is particularly well-suited for the talk radio genre

Mcluhan

«How and why, for example, does seeing a movie on television differ from seeing it in a motion Picture theater, how is reading the news different from hearing it on radio, and how is that in turn different from watching it on TV? In raising and attempting to answer such questions, McLuhan in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s developed an intricate  taxonomy of media and their effects, one which reached back to the origin of our species for comparisons » (Levinson, 1999: 1-2)

Tom Wolfe asked in 1965, “What if he is right?” Might McLuhan be “the most Important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov?” Although Wolfe surprisingly included Pavlov on that list, he was asking the right question. And the perspective of Digital McLuhan is that the answer is yes» (2)

 

Whatever the heat or coolness of radio and recordings, they could never warrant the level of involvement of telephone, for the plain reason that they are deaf to the voices of their listeners (unless, of course, someone calls a radio station on the phone – in which case, the addition of the phone makes radio interactive). And radio poses another problem for hot/ cool analysis. How is it that radio, a sound-only medium, can be hot, while television with its audiovisual presentation can be cool? (10)

 

«the Web has made of McLuhan’s proposition that the Xerox was turning ever author into a publisher. (…) The initial formulation of course had more than a dash of hyperbole.  (…) The question for gatekeeping in the digital age will be: with the Web removing the technological and economic recsons for the pre-sorting of information, will the public still100k to gatekeepers to provide an imprimatur of what is best to read, see, and hear, or will audiences seek out and ratify a more direct relationship wih creators? (11-12)

 

«The Internet, of course, is seen in a rear-view mirror par excellence. Its critics are prone to see it as a television screen; its devotees, including me, are inclined to see it as an improved kind of book. But the truth of the matter, yet to be fully determined, is that the Internet is and will be a combination and transformation of both books and other media such as telephone as well, and thus is something much more, much different from any prior media. The rear-view mirror cannot tell us what that is, but it can remind us not to get too mesmerized by reflections of the immediate past. The driver who looks only into the rear-view mirror, or even too often, and accords consequently short shrift to the road ahead and its new possibilities can quickly end up on the side of the road, or worse.»

 

A nova lógica de gatekeepers

I also knew that McLuhan shared this jaundiced view of publishers noting as often as he could, and with special relish, how “the Xerox makes everyone a publisher” (1977a, p. 178). (…)…But I also realized that photocopying would not provide the solution For although it was inexpensive and widely accessible by the 1970s, its output looked nothing like books, newspapers, magazines, even academic journals – the media in which writers had become pleased since the advent of the printing press to present their words to the public. Thus, like so many of McLuhan’s observations, the photocopier as publisher was more metaphor than reality. levinson, 1999120

 

«Letters to the Editor” are supposed to serve as a remedy for the oversights and errors of gatekeeping: if the newspaper fails to print something Important, or makes a mistake in its reporting, an alert reader can send .d a limitations that engender gatekeeping in the first place work to keep the overwhelming majority of such letters unprinted. … 123

 

And yet Walter Cronkite conc1uded each of his CBS-TV nightly newscasts in the 1960s and 70s with a sonorous “And that’s the way it was” – the broadcast equivalent of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” and just as misleading. A more accurate tagline would have been, “And that’s the way the editors at CBS decided you should think it was.’ Today, television networks present their news with much the same underlying attitude as Walter Cronkite, if without the explicit (yet historically endearing) self-benediction. But call-in programs on radio and cable television, and the rapid expansion of cable television in general, have begun to pry open the gates. These, far more than the Xerox cited by McLuhan, are actually allowing samples of “everyone” to publish on the air. 124-

 

Amazon.com’s approach to book reviews is also indicative of a new gatekeeping without gates.  128

Amazon.com seems further instructive of how a digital future might operate along the lines of McLuhan’s “everyone a publisher.” Listings for books frequently show titles of similar books that buyers of the instanced book also purchased. Buyers are encouraged to “click” on options that cause Amazon.com to notify them when future books by a specified author or about a specified topic become available. These and similar “push” technologies – i.e., programs that, once set, automatically bring selections to customers, in contrast to “pull” technologies which require the user to search the online bookstore or Web anew for each desired selection – show the transformation of gatekeeping in online bookstores to special delivering. (…) Such “matchmaking” (as Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact magazine, aptly calls this new editorial function; see Levinson & Schmidt, forthcoming; also Schmidt, 1989) can further develop in a variety of ways. 129-130

A necessidade de um gatekeeper

This persistence of the assumption that gatekeeping is needed may be its most enduring legacy, and one that survives the advent of media like the Internet that make it unnecessary. Levinson, 1999: 125

Cuidado com o media-determinismo

«I have often criticized McLuhan for his media determinism (e g., Levinson, 1979a), or tendency to cast humans as the “effect” of technology, rather than vice versa (see, for example, his observation that humans are the “sex organs” of technology, 1964, p. 56 – the modern rendition of Samuel Butler’s line that the chicken is the egg’s way of making another egg, also picked up in the twentieth century by Richard Dawkins and his view of the organism as the gene’s way of making more genes).  Levinson, 1999: 40

O novo meio e os conteúdos

There is no such thing as a medium without content, for if it had no content, it would not be a as a medium. McLuhan (1964, pp. 23-4) cites the electric light as a hypothetical example of “pure information,” or a medium without content, but then aptly notes that its content is what it shines upon and illuminates. (Levinson, 1999: 2-3)

“The medium is the message” is no doubt McLuhan’s best-known aphorism. 35 …_ has been well understood in general, and aptly recognized as the flagstone in McLuhan’s path to understanding media. But, unsurprisingly, much of its subtlety and implication has been wildly misinterpreted as a manifesto “against” content, or that what is communicated does not matter at all. 35  McLuhan’s attempt to shift our focus from content to medium derived from his concern that content grabs our attention to the detriment of our understanding and even perception of the medium and all else around it much as the flood of sunlight on even cloudy days blinds us to t he stars that also inhabit our sky, and of which our sun is but a special, particular case. 36-37 In other words, the user is the content of the Internet – which, it turns out, is much what McLuhan went on to say, in a metaphoric sense, about media in general. 39

McLuhan’s examples of users as content – telephone and television (he also mentions radio) – are all electronic. Telephone, of course, presents a special case, because it is intrinsically interactive, as is online communication. But why distinguish television and radio as media in which the user is “sent”? The answer can only reside in the instantaneity of electronic communication, and the impact it has on the perceiver: whereas books and newspapers bring the world to us, clearly after the fact, radio and TV bring us to the world, to the very scene  of the action. 39-40

“ But sometimes that choice may be difficult to categorize. If I read a newspaper online, is the newspaper the content. .. are the words in the online stories… are the ideas expressed in the words… are they all? The answer suggests that not only do old media become the content of new media, but in so doing retain the older media that served as their content, which in turn retain their even older media as content, going back and back. . . to the oldest medium of all. 41

 

Explicar ou explorar

When McLuhan was called upon to explain, he said his intention was not to explain, but to explore. (Levinson, 1999: 2)

LEVINSON, Paul (1999), Digital McLuhan. Londres: Routlege

QUEM OFERECE E QUEM PROCURA (wolton):

QUEM OFERECE E QUEM PROCURA:

«A televisão e, de forma genérica, a rádio e a imprensa remetem, como se viu, para uma lógica de oferta; os novos meios de comunicação social, para uma lógica de procura. Na realidade, as duas lógicas são complementares, algo que será mais evidente quando a actual relação de forças, um pouco ridícula, entre os antigos e os novos meios de comunicação social tiver perdido parte do seu vigor. Uma coisa é certa: não podemos falar de "progresso" ao descrever a transição entre as duas formas de comunicação; ambas são úteis e, com excepçao dos domínios para os quais cada uma está mais apta, rapidamente chegaremos à conclusão que a escolha entre elas depende da natureza dos serviços e das preferências dos indivíduos, sem que se instale qualquer hierarquia rígida nestas escolhas. Preferir o computador à televisão não dá prova de mais apurada "inteligência" ou de maior 'abertura de espírito". Ao invés, preferir a leitura do jornal ou ver televisão não constitui tão-pouco qualquer evidência de menor adaptação ou menor curiosidade por comparação com aquele que passa horas em frente do terminal de computador. Não há nenhuma hierarquia ao nível individual entre estas duas formas de comunicação, que, na realidade, dependem de suportes, de conteúdos e de preferências de uns e de outros, o que não quer dizer, obviamente, que sejam equivalentes do ponte ae vista da teoria da comunicação.» (2000, 74)

«O debate entre antigos e novos meios de comunicação social não está bem colocado. Apenas deslocando o seu centro de gravidade será possível escapar a essa autêntica guerra religiosa, nos termos da qual qualquer crítica dirigida às novas tecnologias e ao discurso fetichista que as acompanha implica que se seja conservador e adversário do progresso. (...) Há que sair do falso debate antigos vs. modernos; entre novos e velhos meios de comunicação social; entre progresso e conservadorismo... (...)» (2000: 109)

A definição de comunicação de massas

«Lo que llamamos comunicación social o de masas implica la mediación (no es directa), la unilateralidad (los papeles de emisor y receptor no son lntercambiales)y el carácter público y, relativamente, indiscriminado de los mensajes. De ahí el sentimiento de masificación o inmersión en el anonimato que tiene esta comunicación, y que es más patente cuando, correlativamente, parece que disminuyen o quedan marginados los espacios de relación/comunicación más próximos.» (Noriega, 1997:23) 

FERGUSON, Douglas A. (2007), «Editor's Remarks», Journal of Radio Studies, Vol 14, Nº 2, Novembro, 91

A definição do novo meio

In the first edition, we also rejected definitions of new media based solely on particular technical features, channels or content. Instead, deliberately incorporating both technological and social, political and economic factors, we defined them as 'information and communication technologies and their associated social contexts» (Lievrouw e Livingstone, 2006: 2)

A rádio não é apenas ouvir

Há quem defenda que rádio é ouvir. Não temos essa visão tão simplista do meio, na medida em que rádio não é apenas ouvir; é certamente ouvir qualquer coisa (música, vozes, sons ambiente, efeitos sonoros, etc.) mas ouvir com determinadas características, e – é aqui que está a diferença de posicionamento – são essas características que fazem o meio rádio. Prata (2008: 48-49) por exemplo releva que «a ligação humana com o rádio hertziano se dá através do sentido da audição. Isto é, para escutar rádio é necessário apenas o sentido biológico de ouvir, nada mais do que isso». Rádio é muito mais: é – ainda que diminuto – o poder de ligar e desligar, de escolher entre a oferta disponível, de procurar os conteúdos que mais interessam, é valorizar uns em detrimento de outros. Rádio é numa relação com um conteúdo sonoro… que se ouve.

A rádio depois de Adorno deixou o ouvinte mais passivo

O que se pretende demonstrar é que a rádio, basicamente desde o seu aparecimento profissional, é a mesma; que, nos seus aspectos essenciais, permaneceu inalterada durante – basicamente – um século. E que a única mudança verdadeiramente estrutural foi a consolidação do consumo secundário, que tornou o ouvinte ainda mais passivo.