Development Of Mass Communication Research Articles

How useful are the demographic surveys in explaining the determinants of early marriage of girls in the Terai of Nepal?

In recent decades significant changes in Nepalese society have greatly contributed to the increase in age at marriage of girls in Nepal. Factors responsible for these changes include educational development, urbanization and development of mass communications. However, many parents still marry their daughters at very young ages and this practice is particularly prevalent in the Terai region. This paper examines several demographic data sets with a view to assessing their utility for understanding the determinants of early age of marriage of girls in the Terai.

Warrior nation: images of war in British popular culture, 1850-2000

War has always been close to the centre of British culture, but never more so than in the period since 1850. Warrior Nation explores the way in which images of battle, both literary and visual, have been constructed in British fiction and popular culture since this time. The rise of war reporting has helped to shape a society fascinated by conflict, and the development of mass communications has aided in the creation of mass-produced martial heroes and the relation of epic adventures for political ends. To achieve national goals, the notion of war has been promoted as an activity of high adventure and chivalrous enterprise and as a rite of passage to manhood. Using a wide range of media, Michael Paris focuses on how war has been sold to boys and young men and examines the warrior as a masculine ideal.

Quo vadis Unesco? an institution at the crossroads

Unesco has multiple missions with action-oriented responsibilities in cultural enterprise, the development of mass communication in the less industrialized world, the spreading of literacy and education, and the encouragement of the natural, engineering and social sciences at university level and beyond. Because of disputes among its 161 member states during the 1980s concerning Unesco's role in promoting mass communication in the developing world, its management came under attack by the ‘Group of 24’—mainly the western industrial democracies. Three countries (the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore) left Unesco by 1986, “about the time that many developing nations were beginning to integrate science policy in national planning”.1 The resulting diminished budget seriously affected programme operations. What has happened since then to the ‘science’ in the organization's name?

The Chinese Television System and Television News

In the development of mass communications in China (as elsewhere), the newspaper is the oldest form, followed only this century by radio, and most recently, television. The earliest Chinese newspaper appeared in the TangDynasty, 1,200 years ago, and was published regularly by successive feudal dynasties. The earliest modern Chinese newspaper, however, was founded in the middle of the 19th century, published by Wang Tao, China's first political commentator.

Communication Rule Structure and the Communication Management of the South African Crisis

The communication and development research literature indicates that as a society develops industrially, its dependence on mediated communication increases (Lerner, 1958, Pye, 1963). There is also an assumption implicit in the writings of many scholars that social development is accompanied by increased professionalization of the production and distribution of mass mediated communication content (Merrill, 1974). In the parlance of professional mass communications, this means that, among other things, there is more and clearer separation between news and information, on one hand, and opinions and commentary, on the other. News and information require that facts be gathered and organized according to the positivist social science methodology which has come to be known as precision journalism (Meyer, 1973). Professional opinion and commentary require that logical, rational, analytical thinking be applied in the evaluation of available facts and their implications. While these kinds of changes have historically occurred as a part of mass communication development, they are not inevitable and are of small consequence when compared with other dimensions of change that also take place not just in the system of national

"Heimat" and the German Left: The Anamnesis of a Trauma

In the fall of 1984, the First (West) German Television Network, ARD, telecast Edgar Reitz's 16-hour television epic, Heimat,' a miniseries consisting of eleven episodes of varying length. Co-produced by Reitz and the ARD stations WDR and SFB, the series realized an ambition which very few products of the New German Cinema (of which Reitz is a charter member) can boast: it was both a critical and tremendous popular success. While the two-part theatrical version (a weekend commitment like Fassbinder' s Berlin Alexanderplatz and a sensation at the 1984 Biennale), was enthusiastically celebrated by cinephiles in West Germany, France and England, the television productions were seen by more than nine million viewers 26% of the total viewing public (with 25 million viewers or 54% of the viewing public watching at least one or several episodes).2 Heimat's location is the Hunsrtick, a small, impoverished rural area in the west of the Federal Republic, hitherto remembered by only a few as the retreat of the famous 18th-century outlaw Schinderhannes (Johannes B6ckler), Germany's Robin Hood. Spanning 61 years of German history (1919-1980), the series is loosely centered around the life of the female protagonist, Maria Wiegand, who early in the first installment marries Paul Simon, the blacksmith's son. Paul has brought back from the war both an expertise in radio technology and a far-away look in his eyes. When, at the end of the first episode, he disappears without a trace, without a word of explanation, the series has established two of its major themes: on the one hand, there is the dialectical relationship between the development of mass communication (radio, telephone, television figure prominently in the series) and the destruc-

Values, Protest and Minority Nationalism in Wales

Since 1945, industrial societies have experienced rapid socio-economic change. Occupational structures have altered to accommodate the new technological skills demanded by many new industries. These newer, smaller and more flexible industries have, in their turn, fostered unparalleled economic growth. Concomitantly, access to education has risen dramatically for all social groups, while the development of mass communications has enabled large amounts of information to be disseminated more rapidly to ever-increasing numbers of people. There is now persuasive and cumulative evidence to show that these profound changes have had two significant consequences for Western societies. Firstly, the values of Western mass publics have altered to place less emphasis on the material aspects of life and a greater priority on aesthetic and intellectual goals. Secondly, there has been a widespread upsurge in popular support for minority nationalist movements advocating some degree of territorial autonomy within their host state or separation from it.

Priority Position of Communication in the African Development Process

In their study of the process of individual modernity in six less developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Inkeles and Smith (1974) reported that urbanization was of little or no consequence as a predictor variable. McClelland (1976: 161) has described this finding as “a shock to some sociologists … who have argued that it is the city above all which makes men modern.” Lerner (1965) and Hoselitz (1962) were among such sociologists who assigned a preeminent position to urbanization among factors accounting for modernization in the less developed countries. Lerner (1965), in particular, argued that in a system of causal indicators, the developmental sequence was from urbanization to literacy to communication and thence to political participation. Support for this conception of the national development process has been reported by McCrone and Cnudde (1967), Akler (1966), Smith (1969), and Sigelman (1971), among others. Several other researchers have, however, reported, as did Inkeles and Smith (1974), that urbanization no longer holds such an important position in the national development process, if in fact it ever did hold such a position in the past (Schramm and Ruggels, 1967; Golding, 1974; Edeani, 1977) and Lerner (1976) himself has conceded that these empirical challenges to his once influential findings may well be valid. Schramm and Ruggels (1967) argue that the spread of transistor radios, roads, and rapid transportation have eroded any influences which urbanization might have had on the growth of literacy and the mass media as Lerner contended, since the data which formed the basis of Lerner's conclusions were collected as far back as September 1950 when these media and transportation developments in the Third World had not become so important. Golding (1974) states that Lerner's research and others like it disregarded the influences of colonialism, international news and media organizations, and the relationship between traditional communication channels and the new media on the development of the Third World. Also, Edeani (1977) reports that, contrary to Lerner's stand, urbanization is a function of economic development and mass communication development.

マスコミ時代の展開と政治過程

マスコミ時代の展開と政治過程

The Mass Media and Their Role in Social Life

The last several decades of the 20th century have been marked by the significant development of mass communications — the propagation of information (knowledge, spiritual values, moral and legal norms, etc.) by technological media (the press, radio, movies, television) to numerically large and spatially dispersed audiences. Within the life span of a single generation, this process has come, by one means or another, to encompass the entire globe. The technological media for the spread of information have penetrated into places where for centuries the only source of information about the world beyond the confines of the patriarchal community had been the spoken word. This penetration, aided by the spread of literacy, has brought about far-reaching changes in people's consciousness and in their attitudes toward objective facts and toward themselves. These changes have created the preconditions for drawing into political life and struggle masses of new people who had formerly lived in conformity to only the interests of their own economically closed and culturally isolated little worlds. The political and ideological cleavages of today's world have caused these preconditions to bear real fruit.

Mass Communication and the Climate for Modernization in Latin America

Amounting number of studies have shown striking relationships between mass communication development and various economic, political and social aspects of national growth. Although these studies generally have been based on available data from countries throughout the world, similar relationships also can be found within regional groups of countries. Among the twenty Latin American countries, we find newspaper circulation per capita correlated .89 with urbanization, .82 with literacy, .80 with per capital income, and a negative .88 with percentage of population employed in agriculture.Such studies, of course, do not establish causal relations. Is mass communication merely a reflection of other more basic factors of development such as urbanization and industrialization, literacy and political participation? Or does mass communication play a functional role in the development process: can the communication of facts and opinions through the mass media actually influence people to move to the cities, take up new skills, learn to read and write, and become involved in politics?

Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in Developing Countries

PrefaceThe United Nations Conference on Freedom of Information, in 1948, called freedom of information of basic freedoms, and free and adequate information the touchstone of all freedoms to which United Nations is dedicated. It is now generally understood that before there can be free and adequate information in any country, there must be adequate development of mass communication. Therefore all countries, new or old, industrialized or not, highly developed or underdeveloped, are properly concerned with development of their communication systems.But one aspect of communication development is of special concern to new and emerging countries. This is contribution that effective communication can make to economic and social development. Free and adequate information is thus not only a goal: it is also a means of bringing about desired social change. Without adequate and effective communication, economic and social development will inevitably be retarded, and may be counter productive. With adequate and effective communication, pathways to change can be made easier and shorter.The following pages take for granted general desirability of free and adequate information, and concern themselves primarily with this second aspect of communication development. They are concerned with part that information can play, if used wisely, to speed and smooth what Julius Nyerere called terrible ascent of developing nations of world toward social and economic modernity.