The Use of Radio by Brazilian Teenagers and the Process of Digital Convergence

Abstract

This article stems from the supposition that a process of convergence affects habits in the uses of radiophonic content by the average Brazilian adolescent. With the intention of proving this argument and of obtaining data indicative of juvenile behavior in relation to radio, students between the ages of 15 and 19 from the second year in public secondary schools were surveyed. The students were drawn from the four main urban centers in Brazil (Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo), where the industry of radio broadcasting is more developed. As a control group, a sample similar to the city of Frederico Westphalen, in the interior of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was used. In methodological terms, the option used was an open-ended questionnaire, allowing for a qualitative approach, as well as the gathering of basic quantitative data. The results indicate a relative separation between the teenagers researched and the context.

Notes

This article is a revised and expanded version of work presented in the Research Group of Radio and Audio Media, at the 33rd Brazilian Congress of Communication Science, organized by the Brazilian Society of Interdisciplinary Studies on Communication (INTERCOM) and held in September 2010 in Caxias do Sul, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The authors thank the educational institutions where the research was developed and the Laboratory of Marketing Research and Public Opinion of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), which tabulated our data.

¹Present in some podcasts, Web radio stations, and within a more comprehensive view, systems of audio sharing and social networks of a radiophonic base.

²Founded in 1991, it is the main Brazilian academic forum in research on radio and other audio media, uniting 170 people, including professors, students, and professionals. During the first decade of the 21st Century, it registered an intense discussion related to the application of the term “radio” to new sound manifestations, especially podcasts. Characterization through language has become predominant since the meeting of the group during the 31st Brazilian Congress of Communication Science held in the city of Natal in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. This process appears partially described in the article Alteraçães no modelo comunicacional radiofônico: perspectivas de conteúdo em um cenário de convergência tecnológica e multiplicidade da oferta [Alterations in the radiophonic communication model: Perspectives of content in a scene of technological convergence and multipliclicity of offerings.] (Ferraretto, 2010).

³Intermeios, translated “Between Media” in the sense of resources to accomplish a task. Project linked to the newspaper Meio & Mensagem [Resource & Message], principal Brazilian publication specializing in publicity.

⁴In this article, the value of 1.78 reais for the sale of American currency is used as a reference, average commercial quotation in Brazil in the months of March, April, and May 2010, when the research was conducted. In the survey performed, the ranges of income went from “Up to a thousand reais” to “More than ten thousand reais,” having a thousand as base.

⁵In the first decade of the 21st Century, in Porto Alegre, the AM broadcasting stations historically linked to the transmission of soccer games, the most popular sport among Brazilians, started to replicate their signal also in FM channels.

⁶A 1-hour program produced by the state company Empresa Brasil de Comunicação and transmitted from Monday to Friday, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. by legal determination.

⁷Ed: A LAN (Local Area Network) house, according to Wikipedia (Portuguese), is similar to a cyber-café, i.e., with (high-speed) Internet access, but with a focus on the ability to do gaming either online or with others in the local network (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_house).

⁸In Brazil, since 1980, the presence of church controlled broadcasting stations has been on the rise. Such programming is dedicated to religious proselytism. Apart from this, the fall of the profitability in the AM stations led many an entrepreneur to hire parts of the programming—when not the totality—for the transmission of this kind of message.

⁹Service offered by the main content portal in the country, the Universo Online radio—<http://www.uol.com.br/>, linked to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, with headquarters in São Paulo.

¹⁰According to the research, 40% consider the radio to be a main media in their everyday lives, second only to television, which 45% claim as their primary medium. The same applies in relation to reliability of the vehicle: Radio comes in second, with a little more than 30% of the ballot, while television appears in first place, with 41.24%. In the consulted sample, 45.86% of the people listen to the radio in search of news and 33.08% because they like transmitted music.

¹¹Web radio—<http://radiorox.oi.com.br/>—which opens spaces for the transmission of requests from the users.

¹²The distance in relation to Porto Alegre (434 km) makes the radio station signals arrive with difficulty.

¹³With an increasing presence in the Brazilian radio market, this kind of teenager-focused program with several participants and interaction with the public appears in the majority of FM stations with pop music content directed at a public of 15 to 24 years of age. However, it is important to note that this particular study did not intend to bring up the specificity of the content accessed by the teens, but rather to bring up clues related to the relationship itself of this portion of the public with the media.

¹⁴A presence of a culture of portability can be traced to the 1960s and develops intimately related to the sound transmissions with the association of the reception of this media to the technological heirs of portable transistorized radios—the mobile telephones and MP3 players or MP4.