Communication and development

Abstract

Three major challenges now confront the communication and development field. First, after a short period of pause and reflection in the 1970s, the so‐called modernization paradigm has been reinvented and expanded—this time under rubrics such as globalization, free markets, and the Information Revolution. In its older and renewed forms, this has been the dominant development and communication paradigm. Second, grassroots movements and indigenous communication modes have been revitalized, and traditional channels of media have been integrated into modern information technologies. This helps invigorate notions of sustainable development, and provides a challenge for the dominant and hegemonic approaches to communication and development. Grassroots and indigenous approaches clash with the modernization paradigm. From this intersection of approaches, a major debate about where we are and where we are going, may well materialize, but in a brand new context. Third, for the last two decades, we have been told that development is a Third World problem. But now we know that it's a problem not merely for the Third World but for everyone, industrialized and non‐industrialized alike. In short, it is a global problem. To deal with this new understanding, we face enormous methodological questions about what tools or procedures we must use to confront the economic, political and social problems of the coming decades. So, cumulatively, the third challenge and possible transformation in the field must be a methodological one.