Communication and Development

The proliferation of the mass media, especially radio, in the wake of World War II convinced many in the West that "international communication was the key to the process of modernization and development for the so-called Third World" (Thussu). Political scientists like Daniel Lerner thought that in order to develop, the traditional societies needed to be modernized first because their cultures and traditions are a barrier to their development. This is called Modernization Theory.

In short, Lerner and others like him, thought that to develop means to Westernize first. They probably took this view from the role of communication in development in the Western world. What they failed to realize was the fact that in the West, the mass media took their birth and then gradually developed as the Western society moved ahead. We can say that the creation of the mass media took place in the light of the needs of expanding empires (all of them Western) and their indigenous societies.

Mass media are part of the whole, which is called society; it is not something outside of it. If mass media affects society, it also gets affected by the society, as Harold Adams Innis says that there is a "dialectical relationship between society and technology: they influence one another mutually." The problem with the Third World countries was--and is--that they had not developed enough while a developed and powerful media 'invaded' them. Since it was not in sync with the new media, it's use--though created more wealth--increased social, political and economic disparity in the Third Word countries.

Innis makes a nice argument that "new media threaten to displace the previous monopolies of knowledge (which is power), unless those media can be enlisted in the service of the previous power structures." And exactly the same happened: the imperial West enlisted the new media in its service and it enhanced their power (Global monopoly). While in the developing world the so-called elites monopolized the new media and in the process became more powerful (Local monopoly).

Resultantly, the haves gained more while the haves-not suffered. In a nutshell, the West was not developed by the media; the case is vice versa. Yes, the new media expedited development in the West, but the Western society shaped the new media according to it's own needs. The developing countries have to harness the power of the media for their development, while the West instead of defining reality for them, has to take their reality too. As Earl Shorris (1997) says when anyone other than the poor defines poverty, the definition itself becomes a force against them. Therefore, development has to be defined by the developing world itself which is possible only if it has its own mass media.