Extra-radio world:
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(Alan Beck's term) The world to which listeners have access through production and broadcast. This is the equivalent of film's 'pro-filmic event' and the 'extra-cinematic world'. It is the world out there at which the microphone points. This must be related to radio apparatus theory.
Beck, Alan, 2002, The Death of Radio? An essay in radio-philosophy for the digital age, electronic book published by Sound Journal
6.3 reality/Lifeworld and the extra-radio world Again, I strive to find workable terms for those connections between a media text and its reader. I will discuss (a) reality and Lifeworld, (b) the pro-filmic event (from film theory) and (c) my coinage to match this, the extra-radio world, and (d) referentiality. And I will warn that the terms are not stable. (a) Reality, long debated, and as a short-cut definition, is the 'simply there' and: This reality of everyday life does not require additional
verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply
there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. I know that
it is real. Reality is the extralinguistic 'reality' that constitutes the space that determines man's existential condition. It is discursively shaped, of course: [R]eality is something we construct … something that
results from the interaction of what we bring, and the world
we bring it to. For 'reality', I prefer to use the Lifeworld, the sociologists' term. I also refer to the listener's own existential situation. (b) The next term is the pro-filmic event. Film studies employs the convenient 'pro-filmic event' for what the camera shoots (Sweeney 1994). There is also the 'extra-cinematic event'. So one talks of the pro-filmic reality, in the case of film documentary, and of the plausibility of the fictional pro-filmic world (King, 1992, 35). (c) My coinage to match this is the extra-radio world. As I say, this is on the example of the pro-filmic event and the extra-cinematic event, and it seeks to meet a similar need in radio theory. The extra-radio world is the term for what radio 'shoots', so as to speak, or records and collects. It designates all that is captured by the radio microphone 'out there' and all that is captured - now - digitally (sampling and treatment). It is the world to which listeners have access through production and broadcast. This also enables me to speak of radio and the extra-radio (again on the model of the cinematic and the extra-cinematic). So the extra-radio world covers both the actuality of the
Lifeworld (e.g., interviews, newsreading and chat) and then on
to entertaining fiction. Like its film equivalent, it is a term
to pin down all that the microphone is pointed at. There is a
slight contradiction in that it has a hint of deriving from the
production stage of radio, and there is the post-production stage
also to consider. Most of the data that radio collects for broadcast
is still through the technology of the microphone and the rest
comes from digital sampling etc. My term uses 'world' rather
than the 'event' of the pro-filmic event, and does so because
the film term deals much more with narrative fictional film and
also because I wish to link with another coinage of mine, the
'radioworld' which I introduce in Section 7. Also the 'pro-'
of the film term suggests the visual use of the apparatus, with
the 'mise en scène' laid out in front of the camera lens.
My 'extra-' hopefully covers all the formats (genres) of radio,
and both the microphone and digital collection of data. |
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