Paper short abstract:

Radio today means way more than its airwaves: facebook, whatsapp, telegram and other digital media come together for the everyday functioning of ROA, the oldest indigenous radio station in the Altiplano. This paper explores ROA's inter-medial practices and how to approach them ethnographically.

Paper long abstract:

What is "local" in a local radio station? Although, apart from Spanish, ROA (Radio Onda Azul) broadcasts in two local indigenous languages (Quechua and Aymara, in its Puneño linguistic variant), its media life is involved in a series of regional, national, and international connections. Every day, ROA's Quechua programmers produce short segments that will travel the airwaves and servers of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia through the international network of Quechua and Kichwa radio stations. Whatsapp groups and Telegram calls are crucial in mediating these radio productions, while Facebook serves as the favorite platform for immediate interactions with ROA's public. When I started doing research on the media practices and linguistic ideologies of this trilingual radio station I was faced with an inter-medial reality. In trying to organize the data that kept flowing (and intersecting/ overlapping) from these different media forms, I had to reshape my methodological toolkit and rethink some of the notions that lay at the base of ethnographic research, such as participant observation, fieldwork/fieldspace and the practice of note-taking. Since my daily work involved media professionals, I was also constantly pushed by them to include more of their own methodologies in my ethnographic approach, such as classic content analysis and the production of "media-cards" (similar to bibliographic entries) for the organizing of my data. Following the inter-medial format of my fieldwork interactions, this paper interpolates ROA's everyday media situations with my methodological reflections, doubts, and graphs/drawings, as well as fieldwork interdisciplinary encounters.