Globalization, Development and the Mass Media

Colin Sparks

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446228890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Globalization, Development and the Mass Media gives a comprehensive and critical account of the theoretical changes in communication studies from the early theories of development communication through to the contemporary critiques of globalization.

It examines two main currents of thought. Firstly, the ways in which the media can be used to effect change and development. It traces the evolution of thinking from attempts to spread ?modernity? by way of using the media through to alternative perspectives based on encouraging participation in development communication. Secondly, the elaboration of the theory of media imperialism, the criticisms that it provoked and its replacement as the dominant theory of international communication by globalization.

1

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the role that the media and other forms of communication can play in improving the conditions of life for the world’s poorest people. The scale and depth of world poverty is perhaps too familiar, but some of the figures bear rehearsing once again. According to the World Bank, in 2002 there were 1,200,000,000 people who lived below its official poverty line, which is set at an income of $1 per day (World Bank, 2002a: 2). Many millions more live on incomes only a little higher. Roughly the same number of people has no access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation facilities (Schumacher, 2005). More than one billion have no access to electricity (World Energy Outlook, 2002). Worldwide in 2005, 771 million people, the majority of them women, were judged illiterate according to the most basic of definitions (UIS, 2005). 150,000,000 children under five years of age were malnourished in 2000 (World Bank, 2002b: 3). The litany of absolute deprivation goes on and on. The lives of these people are immeasurably remote from the experiences of the writer of this book, and from that of the vast majority of its readers, but common humanity must surely suggest to all of us that improving the lot of the world’s poor is one of the most pressing collective tasks we face.

Poor and very poor people are to be found all over the world, even in the fabulously rich cities of Europe and North America, just as extremely rich people are to be found living in luxury surrounded by a sea of poverty in those countries where 23 per cent of the population exist below the World Bank’s official poverty line. The vast majority of the poor, however, live in poor countries. Many live in Asia and make up a good proportion of the huge populations of India and China. Many more live in Africa and further millions are to be found in Latin America. There are even many who are very poor, in relative terms at least, living in the countries that have emerged from the collapse of Soviet communism.

The countries that are hosts to these oceans of human misery have been given various labels, many of which contain some derivative of the verb ‘to develop’: less-developed countries, under-developed countries, and developing countries. The very categories proclaim that changing the circumstances that blight the lives of millions is an urgent and present task. Literally millions of people – politicians, scholars, bankers, activists and very ordinary people – have for over more than half a century tried to find ways to end the conditions that produce poverty. These efforts have not been entirely fruitless. There has been change and progress, but it has been bitterly slow. The total number of people living on an income below $1 per day fell from 1.3 billion to 1.2 billion in the course of the 1990s. In some parts of the world, notably China, the fall in the numbers of the extremely poor was quite sharp, although the gap between rich and poor widened drastically and the destruction of existing social infrastructure has meant that while incomes rose marginally living standards remained static or even declined (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, 2005: 67). Elsewhere, notably in the former communist countries of central Asia, poverty increased inexorably (World Bank, 2002a: 2).

Some of the people who have been concerned about development issues have been interested in the media. They have tried to find ways in which communication, and particularly the mass media of newspapers, radio and television, can be used to help countries ‘develop’ and thus to reduce the amount of poverty. Most recently, there has been enormous interest in the potential of the internet to aid in development. Many of those who have tried to use the media for development have been activists – journalists and broadcasters, development workers and politicians – but some have had a more theoretical role. There have been thousands of books and articles dedicated to trying to understand what role the media might play in development, and to finding ways in which it might play such a role more effectively. Unlike many areas of communication theory, these investigations have often been closely tied to practice: scholars have theorized about the best ways to use the media to help development, and activists have tried to implement their findings.

This book is concerned first with ideas about development and the media. It seeks to understand the theories that have more or less directly guided thousands of practical development projects, and it draws on the distilled experience of those projects – some of the most grandiose were even formally called ‘experiments’– as one of the ways of judging the value of the theories themselves. These close links between the ideas discussed in the academy and their immediate practical utility are a relatively rare, and for this writer very attractive, feature of much of the writing about the role of the media in development. Here, however, the focus is on the theories that guided action rather than on the details of the practical implementation of development projects.

Not everyone who has written in this field has had a close concern with practical projects, and even many who did have such concerns based them explicitly on general theoretical propositions. More recently, and particularly in the last decade, writers about the international role of communication have tended to be influenced by theories of globalization, and have more or less consciously believed that the solution to poverty lay not in human agency but in the impersonal working of the market. For many of them, the only valid kind of practical project is that which leads to the opening of markets and the freeing of trade. Just as the World Bank, the IMF and the governments of the developed world came to agree on the ‘Washington Consensus’ that attempts at protection and the defence of local industries are obstacles to development, so there are those in the field of communication who hold similar views of the mass media. This book is also concerned with those theories, since they have, in the academy at least, replaced earlier interests in communication and development, although, as we shall see, ideas that are regarded as hopelessly outmoded in the best universities can retain a vigorous life outside their walls.

The historical dimension

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The intellectual history of this field is conventionally divided into three, and sometimes four, distinct phases (Boyd-Barrett, 1997: 16–21; Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1991). The first concerns were with the effect of international propaganda, particularly in the context of the great wars of the twentieth century. Immediately after the Second World War, some of the people who had worked on propaganda issues began to think about the media and development. They believed that the mass media had a crucial role to play in fostering modern attitudes and beliefs, which were thought to be the primary conditions for any significant social changes. This was the period during which what came to be called the ‘dominant paradigm’ of development communication was elaborated. It was followed by a much more critical phase, in which two distinct emphases are discernable in the literature. On the one hand, attention was focused upon the structures of international communication, which were held to be at least partly responsible for the continued subordination of developing countries to the interests of the metropolitan powers. Media and cultural imperialism were the central theoretical concerns of what we may term the ‘imperialism paradigm’. The other line of thought saw the key weakness of the dominant paradigm as residing in its top-down approach. It started from a belief that the experts know what is best for everyone else, and designed communication programmes to transmit the fruits of that expertise to the people who were to ‘be developed’. The alternative was to find ways of allowing the objects of development to become its subjects, and to use the media to give them a voice of their own. This stress upon the needs of the communities in question in discussion of development we may term the ‘participatory paradigm’.

In contrast to both of these approaches, more recent writing has stressed the extent of the global flow of media content, and seen in the variety of interpretations open to audiences evidence that the mass media could not possibly have the kinds of direct influence ascribed to them by earlier schools of thought. On the contrary, the products of the world’s media industries often had a liberating effect, breaking down the habits and routines of obsolete social orders and promoting change and development. This domestication of the interests of grand social theory to the concerns of the media we should obviously term the ‘globalization paradigm’. To this more or less conventional account, I will only add that most recently there have been some small signs of the emergence of a generation of writers who are advancing what may become another new paradigm, although this is as yet so underdeveloped that it is difficult to give it the same kind of snappy title as its predecessors (Hafez, 2007).

The general outline of this intellectual history is widely agreed by commentators on the field, and this book will not offer any radical departures from its main contours. We should note, however, that the different phases of this debate do not fit perfectly together. The concern with development communication, in all its variants, has a stress upon the local. The imperialism paradigm and the globalization paradigm, on the other hand, are concerned with very large scale issues. In practice, it is true, some of the later versions of development communication were quite closely associated with the imperialism paradigm, and more recently attempts have been made to associate them with globalization. As we shall see, these linkages have never been theorized, and indeed they rest on radically different foundations. The aim of making such a linkage was nevertheless entirely justified. The kinds of social change that are at stake in this book are ones that necessarily raise broader issues of power and property, and one of the aims here is to sketch how these two levels of analysis might be brought together more satisfactorily.

As a consequence, this book follows the established historical succession rather closely, but I would like at the outset to offer a disclaimer: this book does not pretend to be a formal history of the field. The study of intellectual history is as fascinating as any other kind of historical enquiry, but it imposes disciplines of completeness that are not appropriate to this project and it implies a greater dependence upon the written record than will be found here, where the focus is more on interpretation. There are large parts of what everyone would recognize as the ‘history’ of this field that are treated rather cursorily because they are not pertinent to the main focus of the book. A case in point is the detail of the progress of the New World Information and Communication Order through the various arms of UNESCO, which was one of the major sites of conflict about international communication for a decade in the 1970s and 1980s. As it happens, the succession of conferences, resolutions, amendments, victories and defeats, are well covered elsewhere, for example by Nordenstreng (1984, 1993), and I have very little to add to such scholarly endeavours. Many of the issues that were raised in that conflict, however, remain unresolved and the aim here is to address at least some of those rather than re-analyse the record. Of course, it is neither possible nor desirable to ignore the succession of events, since the relationship between theory and practice was, in this instance, both extremely close and very problematic, but the focus is on the guiding ideas rather than on the details of resolutions and votes.

Issues of redundancy and competence apart, the main reason there is no attempt here to produce a genuine history of the field because the aim is to present many of these ideas as contemporary concerns that continue to inform practice. Just as development, at least in the non-theoretical sense of people struggling to lift themselves out of poverty, remains the central existential concern for millions of people, so important parts of the legacy of thinking about the developmental role of the mass media remain in active use as practical guides around the world.

It is entirely true that very few people in the best academies in the USA or Europe are today much interested in development communication, in theoretical critiques of the dominant paradigm, or the implications of the distinction between media and cultural imperialism. At best, it is the province of specialists closely linked with practical concerns (Gumicio-Dagron and Tufte, 2006). This is partly for a very good reason: academics are trained to keep up to date, and to concentrate their energies on emerging issues and concerns. Intellectual historians apart, few people are concerned with material published forty or fifty years ago. There are, however, also some very bad reasons for the neglect of these ideas. One is the belief, which is emphatically not shared here, that change in the social sciences equates with progress in our understanding of the world. On this account, ‘more recent’ equals ‘better’. Whatever may be the case in the physical sciences, social science is so bound up with interpretation that we cannot assume that date determines value. Max Weber, who figures largely in much of what follows, as he must in any account of communication theory, died eighty years ago, but he still remains an enormously interesting and stimulating author whose ideas were, in the 1990s, applied with great effect to very contemporary phenomena (Ritzer, 1993). The view taken here is that it is worth reading some of the texts of earlier phases of communication theory for the same reason: because we might learn something from them that will help us understand our present situation.

The second bad reason for not reading dated texts is that academics seldom look outside the world of scholarship. It is assumed that if an idea is disregarded in the best academies, then that is the end of the matter, and nobody anywhere could possibly be so foolish as to find it valuable or useful. This is a completely mistaken approach, at least for the issue of development and communication. Studies have shown that the founding texts of the dominant paradigm, despite a surprisingly long academic afterlife, have more or less vanished from the contemporary scene, at least as far as explicit citations in the scholarly literature are concerned (Fair, 1989; Fair and Shah, 1997). We shall see, however, that there are numerous contemporary large-scale social programmes that operate within the intellectual framework of the dominant paradigm, and even one or two academic studies that sneak it in, perhaps unconsciously. If one asks what currency many of the ideas discarded by academics decades ago still have, then in this case at least, the answer is: a great deal, amongst politicians, activists and development organizations.

Scholar militants

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One of the reasons for the long life of the ideas under discussion is that, for the first two phases of thinking, the people who developed and advanced them were self-consciously concerned with implementing their ideas in social action. While the founders of the dominant paradigm taught in elite US universities (MIT, Stanford, Illinois), they did not consider themselves as privileged inhabitants of ivory towers cut off from the mundane activities of the world. They had a conception of the role of the academic that placed them in the centre of the great social conflicts of their age. The phrase they had to describe themselves was ‘policy scientists’, whom they defined as ‘the man of knowledge as adviser, applying his special skills to current problems of public policy’ (Merton and Lerner, 1951: 284). Programmatically, impartial scientific enquiry was one dimension of the work of policy intellectuals, but they willingly involved themselves in providing solutions to problems identified by their government, while remaining aware of, and avoiding the dangers of becoming, what they termed bureaucratic intellectuals for a garrison state.

In practice, however, the leading figures amongst them aligned themselves very closely indeed with the garrison state. If the policy scientist was ‘concerned with bringing the findings of systematic research to bear upon current issues and process of policy’ it was clear that ‘one persistent issue of democratic policy in the last three decades has been: how to cope successfully with aggressive totalitarianism’ (Lerner et al., 1951: 91). Any study of the published record shows a group of very prominent social scientists – Klapper, Lasswell, Lerner, Merton, Pye, Schramm, de Sola Pool – working together in different combinations on projects for various US government agencies. The historian of their efforts writes of ‘the continuing, inbred relationship among a handful of leading mass communication scholars and the US military and intelligence community’ (Simpson, 1994: 89). Simpson perhaps overstates the case that these scholars were attempting to develop a ‘science of control’, but a glance at two of the leading figures shows that the links he identifies were certainly significant in their careers. According to Daniel Lerner, ‘The policy sciences of democracy face no more important task than to produce an accurate diagnosis of the Communization process as a guide to effective – in this case, usually preventive – therapy’ (Lerner, 1967a: 467–8). He himself traced a path from the Psychological Warfare Division of the US Army, through the Hoover Institute, where he directed the programme on ‘Revolution and the Development of International Relations’ (Ithiel de Sola Pool was his assistant), to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Samarjiwa has persuasively argued that during that trajectory he established a relationship with the US Department of State that fundamentally influenced the intellectual framework of his major book, The Passing of Traditional Society (Samarjiwa, 1987: 7–10). The work at MIT, at least according to Mowlana, was funded by the Ford Foundation, allegedly acting as a conduit for the CIA and the US Air Force, and constituted an attempt to develop a systematic basis for government policy (Mowlana, 1996: 6ff). Wilbur Schramm was similarly engaged. He co-authored a US Air Force funded study about the North Korean takeover of Seoul (Riley and Schramm, 1951). The intellectual concern with anti-communism was a continuing one for Schramm. His influential volume on The Processes and Effects of Mass Communication (1961) displays a strong interest in propaganda and anti-communism: one of its chapters is a reprint from a USIA handbook (Bigman, 1952/61). Later in his career, Schramm founded the East–West Communications Institute, on the initiative of then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, with funding from the US government (Keever, 1991: 7–8).

The later and very harsh critics of writers like Lerner and Schramm, coming from the imperialism paradigm, were at least as keen to involve themselves in political action, perhaps believing that philosophers had only interpreted the world differently but that the point was to change it. Among the key figures, Schiller, Smythe and Nordenstreng all identified themselves with leftist politics, although only Smythe acknowledged having joined a leftist party (Lent, 1995). Nordenstreng was for several years the President of the Prague-based International Organisation of Journalists, and as such played a very prominent role in UNESCO and other highly politicized fora in which media and cultural imperialism were hotly debated. Others, notably Colleen Roach, worked directly or indirectly for UNESCO itself, during the period when it was the key site of battles over a New World Information and Communication Order. As we shall see, the positions they took in these conflicts involved some very serious compromises, both in theory and in practice. The proponents of the participatory paradigm similarly contain many activists within their ranks, notably in non-governmental organizations oriented on development and communication, such as the World Association for Christian Communication.

It is only when we reach the period in which the globalization paradigm dominates academic discussion that we find a markedly lower level of involvement in direct social and political action. As we will see below, this detachment arises not from some scrupulous desire to retain scholarly independence but from a new assessment of the relationship between theories of communication and social change. The new paradigm more or less forecloses the possibility of the systematic use of the media for definite and intended social change, and thus there remain no grounds for the media theorist to contribute to practical projects.

The context of debate

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These paradigm shifts did not take place in an historical vacuum. No ideas ever do evolve without reference to the times in which they are developed, and this general rule is doubly true in the case of ideas that attempt to make the sort of close link between theory and social action that characterizes those under discussion here. It is in fact very difficult to understand the emphases and implications of the different paradigms witho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Communicating Modernity
• 3 The Passing of Modernity
• 4 Varieties of Participation
• 5 Cultural and Media Imperialism
• 6 The Failure of the Imperialism Paradigm
• 7 Globalization and the Media
• 8 The Limits of Globalization
• 9 Towards a New Paradigm
• References
• Index