Radio: sounds that can be heard, seen, touched and felt!

Signis-Asia is the Asian branch of SIGNIS, a Vatican-organized World Catholic Association for Communication that engages Media for a Culture of Peace, by promoting stories of hope through connectivity. From August 1 to 7, Signis-Asia held a seminar-workshop on Radio in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. The original theme of the seminar-workshop was: “Let’s listen to the radio.” After the first day, the theme was improved, this time with the additional phrase: “Let’s watch radio.” Don’t you think that’s strange? For how can one watch radio? How can one see sound, its colors, its space and its ambience?

There were 23 participants from 10 Asian countries (Indonesia, East Timor, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Hongkong, Japan, Philippines) in the seminar-workshop. The resource persons were Rome-based Fr. Fabrizio Colombano, an Italian Comboni priest and Director of Signis Services Rome who organizes radio and film festivals in Africa and Italy, South Korea-based Mr. Francis Kim, who specializes on sounds, an international awardee and Treasurer for Signis-Asia and Indonesian Mr. Errol Jonathans, CEO of Radio Suara Surabaya, himself an international awardee based in Jakarta. There I represented the World Association of Christian Communicators – Asia Region as the Secretary of its Executive Committee.  

At the end of the seminar, we were able to make radio productions and short movie clips or videos which you can watch in my two Facebook accounts that bear my name. This has been a fascinating experience for me. It taught me how to bring radio, the backbone of world communications, into the homes and workplaces of people, in its varied forms: integrated into the whole multimedia experience of TV, the digital world and social media which can be accessed by radio, TV, computers, lap-tops, tablets and hand-held cellular phones! Thus in this world, in our diocese and parish no one is truly alone!

One doesn’t need to build an expensive radio station to do this. The cyber world is a free space for this project. A microphone and recorder for podcast program, aided by one or two inexpensive cameras, yes, even the camera of your smartphone will do, can be live-streamed to reach the homes of families, the kitchens of the cook, the beds of the sick and the homebound, the workplaces of the workers, the fields of the farmers and the sailboats of the seafarers in the high seas.

To sustain this radio as a total experience, a voice that can be heard, seen, touched and felt, one can ask the help of the community members. Yes, community communication and community radio – that’s the thing. Are there housewives willing to share the favorite recipes of their husbands, or young people ready to explore their millennial concerns and aspirations with one another, or smokers victoriously announcing how they were able to lick an expensive and death-dealing vice, or simply watch music and tell stories, or pray and celebrate events liturgically – they can fill the air, they can fill the spaces of your surroundings. This is the power of interconnectedness touching your heart and soul, moving your body and every inch of your physicality! Indeed, radio can be the voice of the voiceless, the platform of the poor, the builder of community life, the defender of our common home and the bearer of God’s living word in our time. Try it. (Fr. Ben Alforque)