Communication and Development

Abstract

In the mid-1970\u27s, a long-time career officer with the United States Agency for International Development evaluated his experience in a book entitled We Don\u27t Know How To Do It. This title summarises well the present-day quandaries in the field of development communication. The drive for world development began after World War II with great optimism. The United States, flushed with a recent crusading victory, looked back proudly at its own :ndustrial and agricultural development and was convinced that this was just a new challenge for \u27American know-how\u27. Europe, too, though rebuilding from war, was conscious ofitself as the apex of Western civilization. Economists now had the tools to eliminate depressions and to ameliorate recessions. Scientists were perfecting miracle wheat and com. Development would be just a rapid transfer of the technology and modem organization of the North Atlantic nations to the \u27backward non-Western world\u27. Techniques of communication and good use of mass media were seen to be at the heart of this \u27technology transfer\u27. The relatively new science ofhow to \u27get effects\u27 with mass media seemed to unlock great power for reaching isolated villages and overcoming the resistance of traditionalism. Thus, communication sciences found themselves at the centre of this new crusade. At the outset, researchers in the industrial nations saw development as largely a matter of economic investment, technology and education. For the new nations emerging in this period, however, the priority was political, economic and cultural independence. It became increasingly clear to many in the developing world that transfer of Western modernity meant a continuation of the same old colonial dependence. For them, development was increasingly defined as self-reliance, non-alignment and the buildingofa New World Economic and Information Order. Meanwhile peasants and immigrants to the new cities saw that development was creating a technological elite who were the midwives of the transfer from the industrial nations. The poor, who remained poor, asked what development might mean for them. This review of the field of development communication is very largely a story of how leaders in developing countries and the poor of those countries have struggled to become the protagonists of development - and to get the communication sciences to recognise this