Tuning into Questioning Voices: Independent Radio as a Minor Media Practice

Author: Ieva Gudaitytė and Matteo Spanò Here we are, in the 21st century, observing the small-scale independent radios springing up internationally to offer us a way to make sense of our sounding world through media today. The need to gather together in small-scale nooks and fringes of mass media to listen as a conscious citizen remains important – to mobilise across the translocal, rather than universally global; to share time and space with activist urgency yet with sustainable care. In this article, we try to outline the way this gathering is attempted: neither by revolutionaries nor shamans, but by questioning voices.  In the later years of his life, psychoanalyst and philosopher Felix Guattari repeatedly referred to a socio-historical transition of exceptional proportions: the coming of the ‘post-media era’. Guattari provided an ambiguous sketch of this concept, from which we can nonetheless draw out its key features: first of all, post-media can be understood as post-mass-media, i.e. a condition in which the capillary diffusion and miniaturisation of communication technologies have ousted mass media from their technological supremacy and, more importantly, from their cultural hegemony. The distinction between different types of media would be overcome, as traditional media were reconfiguring themselves into