Book Review: Two on Development Communication Saving the World: A Brief History of Communication for Development and Social Change, by Emile G. McAnany and Communication, Media and Development: Problems and Perspectives, edited by Florencia Enghel and Karin Wilkins

Abstract

Saving the World: A Brief of for Development and Social Change. Emile G. McAnany. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 208 pp. $47.95 hbk, $25 pbk.Communication, Media and Development: Problems and Perspectives. Florencia Enghel and Karin Wilkins, eds. Nordicom Review 33 (September 2012, special issue).The book and the special issue of Nordicom Review are paired here because, beyond the coinciding year of publication, they contribute the articulation of the expansion of the field of development communication at its intersection with media and social change. Saving the World offers a historical overview of the discipline, while Communication, Media and Development takes on recent case studies theorize about the present status of the field. The meeting of these two publications, at least in this review, should point the growth of the discipline.Both are well written and edited, and clearly organized. Saving the World, authored by Emile G. McAnany, the former Walter E. Schmidt Professor of at Santa Clara University, belongs the History of Communication series edited by Robert McChesney and John Nerone. It documents the history of communication's role in social change, ascertains the present moment in this context, and offers a scheme for judging the successes and failures of such projects. The editors of Communication, Media and Development are Florencia Enghel, PhD, candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and Karin Wilkins, professor at the University of Texas, Austin. The two assembled an impressive group of authors feature in the special issue, which is a collaboration between the peer-reviewed journal for media and com- munication researchers in the Nordic countries, Nordicom Review, and the Swedish web magazine Glocal Times.Drawing from the author's professional experience with communication for devel- opment and social change, Saving the World starts from Daniel Lerner's 1958 primer on modernization (which, interestingly, is only referenced once in the Nordicom Review collection). It then acknowledges the early names of the field and examines the conceptualization of the discourse on communication for development and the UN and UNESCO's institutional assumptions and beliefs carried into practice (p. 45). The book then moves through the 1970s and early 1980s dependency phase, initiated in academic discussions and (very) gradually translated into policy, the participatory paradigm traced Brazilian Paulo Freire and his 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it ends with the most recent paradigm shift toward social entrepreneurship.The book chooses specific case studies illustrate the historical stages, including rural Indian radio; educational television in American Samoa, El Salvador, and Mexico; Tanzanian farm forums; Brazilian, Ecuadorian, and Canadian literacy and media participatory projects; and the model of social entrepreneurship in sites such as an Indonesian news agency, the Ugandan village phone project, Indian technology training, and the human rights advocacy group Witness.A notable shortcoming in McAnany's narrative is the absence of context prior Lerner's initial theorizing, and even prior President Truman's 1949 proclamation to help developing countries modernize, which the author arbitrarily takes as starting point for the historicizing of the new field (p. 13). The colonial past is ignored in the book, despite the wealth of scholarship in a variety of disciplines that has traced colonial thinking the present. …