Media & Glocal Change Rethinking Communication for Development Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (editors) Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Kevin Robins, Asu Aksoy, Oscar Hemer, Silvio Waisbord, Jan Servaes, Patchanee Malikhao, Thomas Tufte, Nancy Morris, Maria Celeste Cadiz, James Deane, Ulla Carlsson, Tim Allen, Nicole Stremlau, Rafael Obregon, Mario Mosquera, Paolo Mefalopulos, Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Madanmohan Rao, Manne Granqvist, Sarat Maharaj, Gilane Tawadros, Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron, Ullamaija Kivikuru, Kemal Kurspahic, Gordon Adam, Clemencia Rodríguez, Minou Fuglesang, Kate Winskell, Daniel Enger, Ricardo Ramírez, Arvind Singhal, Peer J. Svenkerud, Prashant Malaviya, Everett M. Rogers, Vijay Krishna, Christopher Kamlongera Publicaciones Cooperativas [colección] ISBN [10]: 987-1183-26-7 Argentina, Buenos Aires, CLACSO, septiembre 2005 (23 x 16 cm.) 493 pag This book is about exploring both the potential and the limits of communication -of using communication both as a tool and as a way of articulation processes of development and social change, improving averday lives, and empowering people to influence their own lives and those of their fellow community members. The essence is communication. The dilemma is that communication will not solve every problem, althought it can contribute in some ways to problem- solving -we just need to get better at knowing how. The discipline of communication to development is currently at a crossroads, and the approaches taken over the last few decades require serious rethinking. Technologies are evolving on everthing -and communication concerned with debates and issues relating to development and change in society. The aim of this book is a contribute to the critical reflection about how communicaction works in process of change within the contexts of globalization. Foreword “The villager can’t eat communication”. Chris Kamlongera from Malawi |11 made that statement at a seminar in Italy a few years ago –capturing at once the essence and the dilemma of communication for development. This book is about exploring both the potential and the limits of communication –of using commu- nication both as a tool and as a way of articulating processes of development and social change, improving everyday lives, and empowering people to influence their own lives and those of their fellow community members. The essence is communication; the dilemma is that communication will not solve every problem, although it can contribute in some ways to problem-solving –we just need to get better at knowing how! The discipline of communication for development is cur- rently at a crossroads, and the approaches that have been taken over the last few decades require serious rethinking. Technologies are evolving, societies are chang- ing, globalization is impacting on everything –and communication for develop- ment is evolving and changing, too: as a tool, as an approach and as a scientific sub-discipline of communication concerned with debates and issues relating to development and change in society. The aim of this book is to contribute to the critical reflection about how communication works in processes of change within the contexts of globalization. Or, to rephrase the opening statement, this book asks: how can the villager –and city dweller– use communication? It would be relevant at this point to say a couple of words about how the book project emerged. It has grown out of the collaboration built up since 2000 in the distance education Master programme in communication for develop- Media and Glocal Change 12 | ment ComDev at Malmö University in southern Sweden. Oscar Hemer has been the coordinator since the programme’s inception in 2000, and Thomas Tufte is one of the lecturers, coming over from Copenhagen to teach and supervise. Every year, some 30 new MA students in communication for development from every corner of the world experience our search for appropriate teaching materials. We spent a lot of time identifying relevant books, putting together collections of articles, and tracing the best course material. This book emerged out of the need to have a starting point for course materials in a single coherent format. Now, almost three years after the initial idea for the book, the present volume is the final product. We would like to thank all the many people who have helped to make this project happen. We would also like to thank our two publishers for agreeing to take on the book: Ulla Carlsson and her team at NORDICOM in Gothenburg, and Atilio Boron, Jorge Fraga, and Florencia Enghel, all at CLACSO, Buenos Aires. Florencia played the important bridging role between Scandinavia and Argentina, having just graduated from the ComDev Master programme at Malmö University; she also came up with the brilliant idea of a joint project between NORDICOM and CLACSO. Many thanks also to DANIDA and Malmö University for financial support for the project. All 36 contributors from all the corners of the world –each in their own way dealing with communication for development– also deserve special thanks for their contributing articles, for showing patience through the editorial processes, and for contributing to this rethinking of communication for development. A special note goes to Everett Rogers who sadly passed away in October 2004, before the publication of his co-authored contribution. Ev Rogers was one of the pioneers in the field, having spent half a century thinking about how to use –and using– communication for development. His capacity for continuously assessing and critically reassessing his own perspectives on communication for development is the spirit this book seeks to capture. Lastly, thanks go to all those people –villagers or city dwellers– who have directly or indirectly participated in, inspired, and served in focus groups and alike –and whose concerns and lives this book hopes to address. Oscar Hemer Thomas Tufte Hagestad, Sweden, and Dyssegård, Denmark, June 21, 2005 Introduction The challenge of the glocal Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte A spectre is haunting the world –the spectre of globalization. All |13 the powers of old academia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: social scientists (especially economists) worry about whether markets and deregulation produce greater wealth at the price of increased inequality. Political scientists worry that their field might vanish along with their favourite object, the nation-state, if globalization truly creates a ‘world without borders’. Cultural theorists, especially Marxists, worry that in spite of its conformity with everything they already knew about capital, there may be some embarrassing new opportunities for equity hidden in its workings. Historians, ever worried about the problem of the new, realize that globalization may not be a member of the familiar archive of large-scale historical shifts. And everyone in academia is anxious to avoid seeming to be a mere publicist of the gigantic corporate machineries that celebrate globalization. The above travesty of the first sentences of The Communist Manifesto, com- bined with the opening reflections on ‘anxieties of the global’ in Indian anthro- pologist Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to the anthology Globalization (2001), gives a fair view of our current predicament, not only or even primarily in the aca- demic world. Whether we like it or not, we are bound to relate to the phenome- non demonized –and exorcized– as globalization. First introduced in the field of cultural sociology to analyse changes in global cultural flows (Robertson, 1992), it has increasingly attained a purely economic definition, as the on-going reorgani- Media and Glocal Change 14 | zation and consolidation of global capitalism since the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of communism as a global competitor to Western liberal democracy. But defined so narrowly, globalization is but one aspect –albeit a fundamental one– of the more general transformational process which Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells has described and analysed as “the rise of the Network Society” (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998). According to Castells we are truly witnessing something new and never before experienced. The network society has evolved, not by historical determin- ism as an orthodox Marxist analysis would have it, but rather by coincidence, through the synergy of a couple of circumstances that happened to coincide: » the new Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the integration of the world into global computer networks; » the shrinking costs of communications in a more material sense (trans- ports), making global migration feasible; » the fall of the Berlin wall and the restructuring of global capitalism; » the new social movements –women’s rights, the environment, human rights, etc.– that have evolved since the 1960s. Whether we share Castells’ notion of a ‘qualitative leap’ or regard globalization as merely the culmination of a process which has been under way for at least 150 years, we can all agree that the rapid global changes in the last few decades, illus- trated by the two symbolic landmarks of the crumbling Berlin wall and the tum- bling Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, face practically all sectors of human society with new challenges, not least the field of communication in a develop- ment context. This field is currently undergoing a series of changes and innovations. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) are setting a new scene for access, content, formats and interactivity. Economic globalization