Grassroots Renaissance; Folk Media in Third World Nations

Abstract

A N old media form in new settings has caught on in the 1970s in Third World communications. The use of traditional or folk media to aid recent national development programmes seems to be upstaging the paradigms of the 1960s that emphasized bigness in mass media development, non-participatory, uni-directional information imbalance (one-way flow of information from urban centres to rural areas or from foreign nations to Third World cultures), and that played up development in terms of economics at the expense of peoples' values, beliefs, attitudes and the societal needs. It is becoming apparent that mass media such as newspapers, broadcasting and film in their present form cannot adequately perform the development roles expected of them, mainly because they do not reach enough of the Third World population with credible and relevant information. The result has been that media 'experts,' both local and expatriate, have discovered in this decade what the peasants have known for centuries the valuable contributions that grassroots media are capable of making. This paper will discuss the use of folk media, either in their traditional rural settings or when adapted to mass media, to bring about social awareness of national development plans. It will also look at the role of interpersonal communications networks.