Media and Development

Richard Vokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317754695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

At the start of the 21st century, the relationship between media and development has never felt more important. Following a series of 'media revolutions' throughout the developing world – beginning with the advent of cheap transistor radio sets in the late-1960s, followed by the rapid expansion of satellite television networks in the 1990s, and the more recent explosion of mobile telephony, social media and the internet – a majority of people living in the Global South now have access to a wide variety of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), and live in media saturated environments.

Yet how can radio, television and mobile phones be most effectively harnessed towards the goals of purposive economic, social, and political change? Should they be seen as primarily a provider of channels through which 'useful information' can be delivered to target populations – in the hope that such information will alter those populations' existing behaviours? Or should they be seen as a tool for facilitating 'two-way communication' between development providers and their recipients (i.e. as technologies for improving 'participatory development')? Or should new media environments be approached simply as sites in which people living in the developing world can define 'development' on their own terms?

This timely and original book – which is based on a critical reading of the relevant literatures, and on the author's own extensive primary research – introduces readers to all of these questions, and helps them to reach their own informed positions on each. It also examines the history of, and current debates regarding, media representations of development. Drawing on case studies from all over the world – including: 'hate radio' in Rwanda; theatre for development in India; telenovelas in Latin America; mobile banking and money in Africa, and; GIS and humanitarianism in Haiti – it will be of interest to all undergraduate and postgraduate students of media and development; international development professionals, and; simply to anyone with an interest in how media does, can, or should, change the world.

1 The rise and rise of media for development

● The origins of ‘international development’.

● The place of media within modernization.

● Three models for development communication.

● Social marketing and its applications.

● Experiments with different genres.

The genesis of media for development

Conveniently, the modern history of both international development and ‘media for development’ can be traced to the very same event: US President Harry S. Truman’s Inaugural Address of 20 January 1949. Truman’s speech was made at an extraordinary moment in world history, coming as it did just a few years after the world had emerged from the nightmare that was the Second World War, yet as it had already begun to enter into a new era of global struggle (albeit one of a very different order) – that which would become known as the Cold War. In this context, Truman was keen to restate the United States’ commitment to post-war reconstruction efforts and also to position his nation for the challenges ahead. Thus, the first three points of his speech referred to (in order): (1) the United States’ commitment to the United Nations as the foundational authority of the new, post-war, international order; (2) a continuation of the European Recovery Programme (ERP, better known as the ‘Marshall Plan’) through which the US financed the reconstruction of the European economies that had been devastated by the war (the Plan eventually ran until 1952, at a total cost to the US of around US$120 billion in today’s money); and (3) the United States’ intention to create a military alliance with its North Atlantic allies – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO – as a counter to the rising Soviet threat (NATO formally came into existence a mere two months later).

In its first draft, Truman’s speech stopped there. However, at the last minute (or at least, so the story goes) an aide to the incoming president suggested inserting a fourth point, promising to extend the benefits of America’s scientific and industrial progress to all of the poorer nations of the world (such assistance from the US had previously focused upon the countries of Latin America only). The decision – whoever did actually take it – was hugely significant because, at a stroke, it vastly elevated the importance of international development by effectively enshrining it as a key priority for US foreign policy (and by implication, for all of its international allies as well) – one akin to, and interconnected with, rebuilding the international system, reconstructing the major European economies after the war, and defending against the then rising Soviet threat. Reflecting this, soon after the speech was delivered, the US Congress created a new Technical Cooperation Program Unit (TCPU, which was eventually housed within the State Department, although became the forerunner to the contemporary US Agency for International Development, USAID). This was shortly followed by the UN’s creation of an Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (which later became the UN Development Programme, UNDP), and the World Bank’s formation of the International Finance Corporation (IFC, to encourage private investment in the developing world) and the International Development Association (IDA, to provide concessionary loans to the world’s poorest nations). For all of these reasons, then, Truman’s speech is often seen as ushering in the ‘Age of Development’ (for a detailed discussion of Truman’s speech and its implications, see Rist, 2014: 69–79).

Truman’s speech also played a crucial role in defining precisely how development would be understood over the following decades. The wording of Point 4 emphasized the problems faced by people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – for example, ‘their food is inadequate. They are the victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant’ – stemmed from their relative ‘lack’ vis-à-vis populations in Europe and North America. Indeed, Truman’s speech was one of the first major documents to use the term ‘underdevelopment’. The speech also stressed – as a corollary to this notion of ‘lack’ – that the most effective solutions for Southern problems surely lay, therefore, in the transfer of capital and knowledge, especially technical and scientific knowledge, from the North to the South (which might allow the latter to move from ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘developed’; or in other words, to ‘catch up’ with the rich world, or simply to ‘modernize’). In so doing, the speech also brought about a subtle shift in the meaning of the word ‘development’ itself, in that the term now came to have a transitive meaning – to refer to an action which is done by one entity to another (i.e. by a wealthier country to a poorer one). Amongst other things, this did away with any last remaining vestiges of evolutionary thought, in which non-European development was usually taken to be intransitive – that is, as something that occurred within those societies themselves, as an outcome of processes that unfolded ‘under their own steam’. It also naturalized the need for overseas development assistance (ODA), or ‘aid’, through which wealthier countries provide financial assistance to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Of greatest interest here, Truman’s speech also implied a central role for media – and in so doing, it also inaugurated the field of what became known as ‘Media for Development’ (M4D). More recently, and especially following the advent of the internet, the field is now called ‘Information and Communication Technologies for Development’ (‘ICT4D’). However, to avoid confusion, I will simply use M4D throughout this chapter. On the one hand, Point 4’s emphasis upon knowledge transfers already implied the need for vastly expanded media infrastructures (after all, precisely how might any type of knowledge be transferred anywhere in the absence of physical media capable of actually transmitting it?). On the other, the speech’s privileging of the transformative potential of new forms of technical and scientific knowledge, specifically, conveyed an implicit criticism of pre-existing forms of knowledge (i.e. cultural, or ‘traditional’, knowledge) as a kind of ‘bottleneck’ or ‘barrier’ to progress. And at that time, it was already widely believed that the very best way to weaken people’s commitment to these sorts of cultural – or traditional – knowledge was through increasing their exposure to all kinds of modern education and information, as could be most effectively communicated through mass media.

For these reasons, many of the TCPU’s early development projects and programmes placed a great emphasis upon expanding media infrastructures and access, and by the mid-1950s a range of other development organizations – in particular the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – had developed a similar focus. Initially, many of these efforts centred upon radio, as a result of which the period from the mid-1950s onwards saw a proliferation both of radio transmitters and of radio receivers across the developing world. For example, one estimate has suggested that between 1955 and 1970, the number of radio sets in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 460,000 to 33 million (this expansion was greatly assisted by the invention of the cheap and portable transistor radio in the 1950s; Mytton, 2000: 24). However, already by the 1960s, and certainly by the 1970s, these interventions increasingly involved television as well. This was more marked in some parts of the developing world than others – for example, in Central America and in South and Southeast Asia, where the US and Japan, respectively, used ‘aid-for-trade’ programmes as a means both for boosting television coverage, and for creating effective monopolies for their own television manufacturing companies. For instance, one such programme from Japan’s International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to Sri Lanka provided free TV transmission equipment, and free training for staff working in educational television, in return for exclusive import rights for Japanese television makers such as Sony (Paul, 1996). Later, following advances in computing and the advent of the internet, a key focus instead became the expansion of telecentres (facilities which today are more commonly known as ‘internet cafes’). More generally, levels of ‘media saturation’ came to be seen as ‘indexes of development’ in their own right. In other words, ratios of radios and televisions to the number of people in a given location came to be seen as markers of ‘how developed’ that place was. Already by the early 1960s, UNESCO had published a set of minimum targets on this score, which were initially set at: ten daily newspapers, five radio receivers, two television sets, and two cinema seats per 100 people. In other words, media came to be seen as both a means and an end for international development. (Subsequently, UNESCO has overseen a number of other initiatives aimed at monitoring media density in the developing world. Most recently, in 2004, the organization launched the umbrella Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development, which brings together a wide range of other agencies working on this issue.)

Three models for development communication

At the time Truman made his famous speech, the dual notions that international development should be conceived as a transitive process for modernization, and that media had a key role to play in facilitating this process, were both relatively novel – which is to say untested – ideas. Certainly, by then, at least some colonial powers had carried out various experiments for educating their subject populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America through mass communications. For example, following the publication of the Plymouth Report in 1937, the British had undertaken a series of pilot projects across their African colonies with the aim of delivering mass education by radio (at that time, personal radio sets were still too expensive for most people to purchase, and so these pilots were mostly delivered over communal listening posts) (Vokes, 2007a). However, by the late 1940s, it was still not clear precisely what effects these experiments had had – or even, for that matter, whether they could be deemed ‘successful’ or not. Certainly, no general models existed to explain precisely how and why modernization might be achieved through mass media. Thus, it was not until some time after Truman’s speech, and well into the 1950s, that both development agencies and academic observers began to build the evidential base necessary to support the assumptions made in the address, and to develop more general theoretical models for understanding the relationship between modernization and media.

In 1958, a Professor of International Communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Daniel Lerner, published what would become the seminal early work in M4D, in terms both of the empirical evidence that it documented and the theoretical model that it derived from this. The book, called The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, was a detailed, comparative study of the processes of modernization, and of the place that media had played within these, in six countries: Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Based on this wealth of comparative data, Lerner argued that a general pattern existed, whereby western countries’ attempts to ‘modernize’ developing nations invariably began with attempts to build up the latter’s manufacturing industries and education systems. These efforts in turn produced rising urbanization and increased literacy rates, which, over time, generated a desire for new forms of mass media (as the new urban educated classes sought out more news and other information programming). Later, as these individuals’ exposure to media increased, it caused them to become more empathetic to modern values, and eventually to change their worldview altogether and to develop a ‘mobile personality’ (i.e. one that is generally accepting of change and is open to new ideas of economic practice and political organization). According to Lerner, the key trigger here – for any developing country – was 25% urbanization, at which point literacy rates were invariably high enough to generate the necessary demand for new media. Once introduced, the media themselves then effectively took on a life of their own, becoming what Lerner called a ‘mobility multiplier’ for the rest of the way.

Four years after Lerner’s publication, a sociologist based at Ohio State University, Everett Rogers, published another key contribution to the emerging field of development communication, or M4D: Diffusion of Innovations (1962). Indeed, so important did Everett’s book become, that it has continued to be widely read ever since (the fifth edition of the book, which was published in 2003, was recently classified as one of the most widely cited texts in all of the social sciences). Rogers’ work had a similar aim to Lerner’s, in that he too was interested in exploring how a comparison of different cases – in Rogers’ case, he compared more than 500 examples – might be used to develop a more general model of innovations and their effects upon social change, including in developing world contexts. (However, Rogers didn’t limit this study to an examination of ‘modern’ innovations only, such as manufacturing industries and modern education systems. Instead, he was interested in all kinds of innovations, which he defined in the broadest possible terms, as any ‘idea, practice or object that is perceived as new’ by its recipient(s). In addition, Rogers was also interested in what part mass media played in these processes. Finally, the Diffusion model, like Lerner’s, also emphasized the importance of individual attitudes in shaping social change. According to Rogers, all individuals pass through a series of five subjective stages in their adoption of any innovation, in which: (1) they first become aware of its existence (Rogers terms this the ‘knowledge stage’); (2) they develop a growing interest in it (the ‘persuasion stage’); (3) they decide whether or not to try it out (the ‘decision stage’); (4) they start to use it, evaluating its effectiveness as they do so (‘implementation’); before (5) finalizing their decision, based on experience (‘confirmation’).

However, of crucial significance – and this is really the key insight of Rogers’ book – individuals do not pass through these five stages at the same speed. Instead, people’s different character-types, which also correlate with their different levels of socio-economic status, determine how quickly they will go from ‘knowledge’ to ‘confirmation’. Thus, high risk-taking individuals, who are usually also of high status (and therefore wealthy enough to absorb a loss if things go wrong), move most quickly; they are followed by ‘early adopters’, who are open to some risk and are also key opinion leaders in their communities (they are generally also of high status); early adopters are followed by individuals who exhibit varying degrees of scepticism, and who are of varying status (Rogers divides this group into the two categories of ‘early majority’ and ‘late majority’); finally come the ‘laggards’, who are markedly change-averse, display little or no opinion leadership, are of the lowest socio-economic status, and are the last to take up any innovation.

A key question for international development, therefore, became to what extent the introduction of mass media might help to speed up these rates of adoption, especially amongst the laggards? However, on this question, Rogers was more sceptical than Lerner, and found that mass communications do not always take on a ‘life of their own’ within processes of social change (as Lerner suggested). Rather, Rogers argued that although media could play a crucial role in raising initial awareness of an innovation – and therefore in accelerating individuals’ transition from the ‘knowledge stage’ to the ‘persuasion stage’ – after that, and especially during the ‘decision stage’, the role of interpersonal communication was much more important. In other words, beyond risk-takers, most people would be more likely to try out an innovation not if they had heard about it on the radio or the television, but if they heard about it from somebody that they already knew. This drew attention to the key role played by ‘opinion leaders’ (who, by definition, know the most people within any given social setting). The logical conclusion was that in any developing context, media messages should be targeted not at the entire population, but instead at opinion leaders only (who would then communicate these same messages, face-to-face, to the population at large). Rogers later elaborated on this ‘two-step’ model for development communication – an idea which also drew heavily on the earlier work of sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz (who had previously proposed a ‘two-step flow’ model for all forms of mass communication) – in a joint publication with Lynne Svenning, called Modernization Among Peasants: The Impact of Communication (Rogers and Svenning, 1969).

Finally here, in 1964, a communications scholar base...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: media and development, a complicated relationship
• 1. The rise and rise of media for development
• 2. Development in the news: from iconographies of disaster to post-humanitarian communication
• 3. Media, empowerment, and agency: the promises of participatory communication
• 4. Structural-adjustment and media globalization
• 5. ICT4D in new media worlds
• 6. Development and celebrity
• Bibliography
• Index