RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

МагК Schulman ,

Department of Communications, Film, and Video

The City College of The City University of New УогК

RADIO AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION IN HARLE M, USA

I . INTRODUCTION The subject of this рарег is praxis : it is a report of an attempt to put theory into practice through the medium of radio . Within the conceptuat framework of community communication, the project involved establishing a community radio station for Harlem , New York, U.S.A. The author prepared a Ph.D. dissertation ) which examined the myriad guestions involved in establishing a station and then spent the first six months of 1936 working out the logistics of going on the air . WHCR-FM, Harlem Community Radio, first broadcast on July 1, 1986, The complex tasks invotved in getting the station air-ready are the subject of another story . 2 > This paper is concerned with a dif ferent aspect of the problematic under consideration ; how to blend research and resources in order to tmplement a conceptual plan . The author chose a novel and innovative approach to this guestion . Preparing what he called a "document of the future" , he distributed on a small scale a predictive manuscript. It was "fictional" in the sense that it reported events that had not yet occurređ . But its purpose was not entertainment. Instead , the plan was to motivate the mdiviđuals planning the WHCR project to organize the station arounđ a set of principles quite radical in their form and content. Following this section of this paper is the draft of the WHCR Conceptual Manual. It Is reproduced here in its raw form . It was intentionally presented as a rough draft to its readers , and written in a colloguial and popular discourse , so that it would be accessible to a wide range of audience members . The author , conscious that he was vulnerable to the kiss -of -death syndrome associated with acađemic wnting style , overtly chose

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