Community and citizen radio must connect the reality of the territories: Mauro Cerbino

Community and citizen radio should not be subjected to "imposture" and "inauthentic" communication and even less to manipulative communication. On the contrary, it must be characterized as a medium that adds up, that thinks “from” rather than “for”; It is thought from participation, said the professor and communication researcher Mauro Cerbino, when participating in the opening talk of the Production Training Program for a Community and Citizen Radio, promoted by SIGNIS ALC, with the support of ALER and CIESPAL.

For Cerbino, if we do not have the "capacity to create mechanisms so that the radio is open and not a one-way radio, we would be repeating the infamies of the commercial media."

As he remarked, one of the challenges of community and citizen communication is in “training”, for which he congratulated SIGNIS ALC for promoting the training program that brings together 100 young communicators from 11 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We know what happens in university classrooms, in journalism training, and we know that it is there where all distortions are cooked, where all the instruments of manipulation are forged, so an alternative training program, aimed at social justice, a communication to try to fix this infamous world in which we live, this world that due to the pandemic has become even more complicated ”, therefore the proposal of this training program,“ The spark of the Word ”must be a political spark that allows community communication and is able to side with those who have something to say, insisted Mauro Cerbino.

He added that a community, citizen radio station must find the north of "authenticity" and that is achieved by being a station that guarantees participation, not so much a station concerned about the audience, but a station "for someone", a station oriented to some recipients and that can demonstrate the “authentic force of the word and that can be amplified by an online radio.

For Cerbino, “I hope that all the dynamics that are behind and that accompany the development of this radio are not also online, because one of the elements that must be taken into account in a communication for social justice is a communication from the territory, it is a face-to-face communication, it is a communication of bodies, of collective action, a communication that cannot fall into the trap and into the fiction of collectivization through technologies. Technologies should be used as mere instruments ”, so the challenge for online radio such as the SIGNIS ALC proposal is“ to be able to connect and make collaboration possible from different places and territories in Latin America ”, he remarked.
An online radio must serve to connect territories, to make possible the resistance towards a disgraceful globalization, which tries to turn us into slaves of the commercial media. Faced with this reality, an online radio has to connect the reality of the territories, the diverse spaces that characterize our Latin America ”, he said.