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This paper presents the results of a study consisting in the observation of radio broadcast post-reception community practices in West Africa. In particular, it analyses the social interactions that are established in communities spawned by young people’s relationships with the media. The observation of these processes through the lens of the community contexts underlying them provides a variant in the analysis of media audiences. It enables us first to identify the places where active audiences find the motivations for their commitment, and second to bring to the fore the conditions of individual and collective engagement that emerge following their exposure to the media, and in the play of interaction with them.