UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF BROADCAST OPERATIONS DRIVEN BY A CONVERGED DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

Broadcast Media Africa's 2021 conference in Cape Town, South Africa, was dubbed the "Broadcast Media Convention of Southern Africa” and was organised in partnership with the Southern Africa Broadcasting Association. The conference drew attention to several issues, including the technological developments affecting broadcasters and the effect of Covid-19 on broadcasting operations. This article is based on the paper presented there. The article notes that the broadcast industry has evolved drastically over the past few years. However, with rapid technological developments and new trends in the increasingly digital and converged media markets, broadcast managers increasingly must look for new strategies to stay afloat in the competitive and media-rich environment in which broadcast institutions operate. The article posits that the new media ecosystem has essentially brought to the fore one aspect, which was always known but often took for granted – the importance of the audience. The article appraises the developments in the converging environment to improve our understanding of how African broadcasters could continue to innovate successfully. © Creative Commons With Attribution (CC-BY).

The sonic strategies and technologies of listening alone together in The World According to Sound’s Outside In: A Communal Listening Series

This article examines three dimensions of Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett’s practices for producing, sharing and listening to audio in collective and social ways for The World According to Sound’s Outside In: the sonic strategies and soundscape design used to engage communal and collective listening, how Outside In adapts and transforms traditional paradigms using the broadcast medium of the podcast to aesthetically engage with liveness and the corporeality of sound, and how the COVID-19 pandemic afforded space for ‘unpopular’ soundwork based on everyday aural architectures (e.g., field recordings, ambient music, experimental music based on everyday sounds, soundscape collages) that are popular, as in, of the community. Using varied examples drawn from The World According to Sound’s soundwork, I illustrate a particular set of sonic strategies to imagine sonic space, listen relationally to sound events, and enact a sociality of collective listening.