From the airwaves to the digital scenario

The semiotic model of the radio (^{Barrios-Rubio, 2020}) is the support of a tripartite scheme of factors for the construction of sound contents: radial language, technical resources and the listener’s radial perception are the axis of the production of information, orientation, and entertainment elements (Table 4) in the auditory navigation chart of the broadcast radio listeners in the middle of the confinement. Oral expression, and the extension of the human voice in the public arena, establishes a news agenda of communicative exchange in social and cultural processes in the context of relations that alter everyday life. The radio narration and the account of events revolve around a common topic (Covid-19), and adapt to the changes of everyday, to the conjunctural problems of the moment, the circumstances, the people, and the affective dispositions, as happened in Spain and other nations (^{Aleixandre-Benavent et al., 2020}). There is, definitely, a juxtaposition of sounds and meaning in the construction of the message.

The journalistic commitment works the audience’s sensitivities from semiotic and psychological complex references to cope with the variables of the pandemic phenomenon that society faces. In its narrative conception, technological support and formats for the treatment of content are relevant: international, national, and local government restriction policies; procedures to prevent the spread of the virus; the economic and social crisis, among other elements of thematic unification that impacted the world media (^{Casero-Ripollés, 2020}). Problems are embodied (Table 5) from: knowing how to tell stories (to narrate), referring to unknown facts of a known event (to tell), describing the context of a situation from its various aspects, those needed to imagine what is referred to (to portray). Reality is conveyed from information and opinion with the testimonial support of primary sources.

The radio narrative process is supported by the voice of the professional who delivers the message, an element that acquires relevance when combined with testimonies of the protagonists or the people directly affected by the event. It is a set of sound and non-sound codes that outline a discourse from the particularities and functions of the word as a vehicle for information, training and entertaining. It is a newsworthiness and analysis approach to the most relevant facts of the day from a brisk pace, easy lexicon, and proximity treatment. Technical, thematic and enunciative clarity enables the understanding of the fact from the given data, the redundancy brought by metaphors that provide originality, and the degree of abstraction of used sounds that have culturally learned references.

From “on air”, the radio industry shifts towards the online sonosphere (^{Barrios-Rubio, 2022}), a space in which the user is led to develop basic skills of play, performance, simulation, and appropriation. It is a cognition that constitutes a judgment of navigation, negotiation, networking creation and web development community. Communication ecosystem focused on web-media, an informative reference point that attracts traffic and supports the on-air broadcast. A multimedia resource that requires a process of digital culturalization in which ICTS are used and appropriated by the user to redefine themselves under a series of characteristics that specify how to relate to each other and to the environment. Challenge of navigability that guides the user through texts, photos, videos, streaming, podcast, and galleries, some of them prioritized through featured sections. Connection of elements with social profiles (r@dio) where the radio participates in the network trends and the conversation of users; fluctuation of communication proposals in the framework of citizen polarization, social collectives and a support, assistance, and dissemination scheme.

The reality portrayed by the data collected by this study at the particular moment of the investigation denotes a vision of the immediate environment of the social collective: individual’s own and users’ informative record made up of levels of significance, visual codes, and linguistic references. The average of the monthly corpus of messages (Facebook, 2 414; Twitter, 5 709; Instagram, 81; YouTube, 88) connects from a public profile a network of followers, generation @, that can say and narrate things in a new way, since everything goes through the web and social scenarios, a meeting point between each other. A coupled spiral of sound and non-sound contents that gains strength and promotes a functional content and media reengineering, to satisfactorily meet the needs of the audience.

In the digital environment, the radio industry becomes an interpreter of society and shared knowledge, assuming the role of transmedia agent, active narrator, prosumer (producer and consumer of content) and mobilizer of communication and knowledge spaces in digital culture. It presents a social conversation tied to hashtags (#) and memes, decisive factors in the process of creation and consolidation of communities related to the medium and the area of news interest. Attribute of interpretations and attitudes that bind the message together, give emotional connotation to the news, and spread them in the network. Analog-digital fusion capable of understanding computer programming, graphic design, telematics, photography, audio and video production, construction and management of websites, as well as the design of own strategies for social media.

A social message from the radio to listeners-followers-users

In the digital scenario, the basis of analysis is the discourse, the written expression of the conjuncture that seeks to entertain, inform, convince, or persuade the listener-follower-user by using different linguistic expressions to fulfill the expected purpose. A point of contact between the media and the citizen finding out why things happen in everyday life; instances woven into the story that influence the collective imaginary and persuade ideological passions at a time of crisis fueled by confinement. It is a model formed by six actants (^{Greimas, 2002}) (Figure 2) that urges us to look at the context in which communication works and society develops, given that they are important categories such as the time and place where the participants of the communicative act are, that is, the role of each agent without neglecting the purpose pursued by the media.

* Translation of the text on the images:

Left: I would like to call for the Covid-19 vaccine to be of universal access, once it is developed, so it won’t become just business for the pharmaceutical companies…

Right: @Furizgomez The Minister of Health called for the EPS in Bolívar and, specially, in Cartagena to run more Covid19 tests, “We will be closely monitoring the application of the tests and we will go to the ultimate consequences”.

Source: The author.

Figure 2 Model of actants of the social radio message* 

It is possible to identify divergent facets of the discourse that force us to go through the formal structures of the sentences, the meaning, and the reference of what is said, without ignoring the way in which it is expressed. What is presented to the audience to be understood in a specific social, political, historical, and cultural context. In the situation presented above (Figure 2) the “society in general” is set as the receiver of the message, because it is precisely the one involved in the need for a vaccine and the Covid-19 tests; the object is clearly stated: social equity in prevention and cure policies in the midst of the disease crisis; in the dialogue portrayed it is clear that the receiver of the object is the government agencies and the Colombian population; the citizens are the helpers in the achievement of the desired object whose, from the pressure and the non-conformism taken to the streets, demand policies of public care; the subject who performs the action is the protagonist of the story, that is, the radio and its journalists; finally, the opponent to the object is the political opposition that benefits from the anxiety, polarization and population instability in the midst of the pandemic.

It can be said that the discourse varies according to the epidemiological evolution: the first months (January and February) it aimed to share global information of the phenomenon; then (March and April), to address the particularities of strict isolation; the latter (May), to face the fatigue reflected by people. This posed a clear object: the desire to know about the other, about the environment and to find how to address the health problem.

The qualitative analysis of the corpus of study reveals the radio’s effort to inform hour by hour about the everyday events of the pandemic, its evolution and the way it affects the social collective. Thus, the radio establishes a contact with the audience that, in the opinion of the media broadcaster, influences the listener’s vision of reality, their reasoning and argument of why things occur in their near environment. It is a grammatical, communicative, and semiotic epistemology focused on social actors and their signs and keys for dialogue. Local coherence gives meaning to the context experienced and to the theoretical reconstruction of the topic of the discourse. The structural composition varies with the situation changes (increase in contagion, increase in the economic crisis, unemployment, hunger, among other factors), the enunciation of news subjects and their expressions, the relevance to the issue addressed and the character’s empathy with citizenship. Thus, a relationship between a sender and receiver that inspires an affective and passionate feeling in a temporal space that shapes the discourse.

The enunciation is closely linked to the reader of the message, their interpretation and assimilation of the text at the time of the communicative act. The posts and tweets that make up the corpus of study denote the materialization of the event from deictic criteria (22%), personal pronouns (17%), demonstrative pronouns (25%), temporal localization (12%), space localization (20%), and kinship terms (4%) that depend on the dialogue process. The observation of digital texts made evident cognitive aspects (process of learning something about the pandemic), apprehension aspects (using what was learned) and interaction aspects (a relationship with others through the use of that learning) from and with an extralinguistic reality that works in the process of interaction, and the criticism of the government and the way it faces the problem. The interpreted linguistic superposition leads to a pragmatism that gives relevance to the signs used, the semantic level of the referent-meaning relation and the syntax that links the written text with the photographic image, the iconography or the video used to reinforce the construction of reality.

The characterization of everyday problems materializes from iconic rhetoric: visual statements that contain perceived and conceived degrees, codes, repetitions of a basic meaning attribute (isotopies), and layers of differences working all together (allotopies). A regulated transformation of elements allows to show, regarding the observed images, an action focused on the similarity with the referent, the state of the phenomenon and the symbolic level (population difficulties and citizen discontent) (Figure 3), semiotic functions on the expression and content level. The image that accompanies the message is filled with implicit meanings that result from what is perceived and the overlapping interpretations, coding and decoding the image from the previously set rules of the system that allow the identification and reassessment of rhetoric. The qualitative analysis of the sample evidences the determining subunits of a structural unit that, when converging with the message’s written discourse, presents redundancy and leads to determinations of action for the listener-follower-user.

* Translation of the text on the images: Left: Shopkeepers of the Atanasio Girardot Sports Complex, in Medellìn, joined the “trapo rojo” (red rag) protests to ask for Government aid to mitigate their losses due to the quarantine. Video: Antioquía Guardians #MorningsBLU #LiveMedellín

Right: Now, streets of the Juan Rey Sector, in Bogotá, are being blocked by protesters, alleging they haven’t received any District aid.

Source: ^{BluRadio Colombia on Twitter (2020a}, ^2002b).

Figure 3 Visual support of the message* 

The isotopy of the message’s visual communication is shaped by redundancy and leads to the production of a rhetoric relative to the external knowledge of the receiver and that subsists independently of the statement. There is not an establishment of models in terms of cognitive types on a given scene, rather, the receiver already has knowledge about that type of explicit scene, and it is unlikely that there is a deflection of the message. The normalization of elements provides coherence to the message without allotopies that may change it or generate ambiguity to the statement, from discourses of humor, as it does with the memes and followers’ responses on the social network.

The association between the sign and the thought allows the subject to interpret the object of communication (^{Niño, 2008}), the world is a product of the subject’s ideology, the views provided in the media products that they consume and the complementary versions of the facts that allow them to contrast the information. A general prediction of facts is applicable or not (true or false) to a particular component of reality. The object of study’s sample in this research classified the flow of messages in: the negligence of the state, the prolongation of measures that increase people’s economic problems, restrictions on mobility, child suffering during the crisis, social inequalities resulting from connectivity, among other informative variables that, from their continuity in space and time, are considered as general natured. Natural representation accounts for the determinations and sensations defined by the collective imaginary, beliefs caused by factors that are external to what is constructed by thought. The vision of reality is associated with nominalism, and from this reality emerge external factors, individual facts and events, and impressions produced from the individuality of both the journalist and the listener-follower-user in the reception process.

Tweets, posts, images and videos circulating on social networks are turned into the perception of the world, a particular reasoning that gives meaning to the current events and their linking with other elements of social reality, signs that act as indicators characterized in the own names of the actors of the news, and the pronouns that are referred in the development of the news discourse. The words in the message are used as conventions that provide meaning and a real relation to referents of sign, life experiences that become familiar for those who read the message, either because they have lived these themselves, or because they know who lived the experiences, a strong connection of cause. Without describing them, things are denotated by detailing the objects in the images that accompany the message and allow to get to know the context of a situation to generate assumptions and give validity to the elements of the message. Semiotic of signs, interpretants and interpreters revolve around the icon and its monodic relationship with the object in opposition to the dyadic nature of the daily happening.

The communicative ecosystem that links the radio with listeners-followers-users showcases a process of significance in which the subject arbitrarily assigns meaning, conditionals that represent irreducible realities of current events. This actions make evident an editorial purpose in the communication that moves from the traditional broadcasting to the digital arena (background and consequences that allow interpretability of the message). There is an intrinsic relationship between the significance and the purpose that fits the sender’s intention from the representation that is used in the message that goes out to join the social context, a paradox of the arbitrariness which validates the fact that a sign can be interpreted and reinterpreted indefinitely, because there is an endless reasoning process to obtain its meaning. Convergence of intellectual signs (words, concepts, statements, beliefs, or any connotation) consistent to choose the meanings contained in cognition. Abstraction of meaning that, from the context, beliefs, and logic of what is observed, distances from emotion. The qualitative acquis of the study allows us to recognize that habit is constituted in the significance of deduction, that is: the interpretation of a concept that is summed up in an irrefutable reality within the ad infinitum progress of events that are circulating in the radio daily.