One World Emerging? Convergence And Divergence In Industrial Societies by Alex Inkeles

Author:Alex Inkeles [Inkeles, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780813333977
Google: X0G6AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 1998-03-05T03:50:03+00:00

Communication by Radio

Wire services send their foreign news not only to newspapers but to radio and television stations as well. Reuters, for example, sends its material directly to more than 400 radio and television stations, many of which are abroad. In addition, the local radio stations worldwide can get news of foreign events by subscribing to their respective national news agencies, which in turn are linked to the international wire services.

Although radio does not escape the problem of linguistic specificity and the necessity of translation, it does escape the limitations set by low levels of literacy. In addition, the development of the mass-produced handheld transistor radio brings the cost down so low that all but the most destitute household may have one. Moreover, the low cost of the set and the ease of sharing it reduces the cost of each exposure to a level far below that of a single issue of a newspaper. Equally impressive is the ability of radio to overcome the obstacles of distance and other challenges to the distribution of newspapers in isolated places with difficult access. One can go to the remotest village in India or to the settlements on the greatest heights in Latin America and find peasants at work in their fields with a transistor radio hanging from a nearby branch or pole, thus potentially tying their owners almost instantly into events occurring anywhere in the world.

No nation is without its broadcasting station, and the larger countries of course have many stations to blanket their territory. Consequently, the less developed countries alone have more than 8,000 stations, broadcasting mostly on medium wave, and worldwide there are just over 30,000 stations, and these figures do not include China. With more than 50 million net receivers added to the supply each year, the world total reached a billion sets by 1976, and the 1987 total should have reached 1.6 billion sets. That would yield a ratio of close to one set for every three persons, or one for every two above the childhood years.62

If these receivers and stations were distributed uniformly worldwide, then by multiple use of the sets in families virtually everyone in the world capable of understanding the radio could be within listening range of one. Alas, the distribution is far from equal. The less developed world has only one-fifth of the broadcasting stations to serve some three-fourths of the world’s population. When it comes to the sets themselves, the advanced countries are more or less saturated, generally having almost 800 sets per 1,000 people. In the United States there are almost two sets per person, and in most developed countries an average of one set per person. By contrast, the low-income countries were reported to enjoy but a fraction of that level, providing one set for approximately every ten persons in the population.63

It is probable, however, that these figures reported to and by UNESCO under-enumerate the availability of the small and inexpensive transistor radio. Moreover, growth in the number of sets available

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