Development Communication-for whom and for what?

In the context of development, communication media is used to support development initiatives by the distribution of messages that encourage the public to support development-orientated projects. Broadcasting is used for informing the population about projects, which promotes the advantage of these projects and also recommended that these projects should be used. This model sees communication process as a message going from sender to receiver whereby posters, radio and televisions are used to persuade people.
This is whereby Modernization plays a very significant role, where people move from a traditional way of doing things to a different, more technological development and more rapid changing way of life. Mass media are important in spreading awareness of new possibilities and practices. Research has shown that even thou group of public can obtain information from impersonal sources such as radios and television; this information has little effect on behavioral changes. Self-management is seen as the most developed form of participation. This principle implies the right to participate in the planning and production of media context. In all of these, development played a very important part of the movement for a new world information and communication.
Modernization Theory in the 1950s and 1960s and fall of the theory in America and Russia were booming economically and ideologically. This is after Stalin’s Five Year Plan and America recuperating after the Great Depression. It was believed that Third World countries could develop if they adhere to modern values and drop traditional ones. Societies could develop if they were exposed to new ideas and technology. Theorists assumed the following: underdevelopment was a stage towards development; once the process was started it would flow relatively smoothly.
The fall of modernization occurred in the 1970s. Criticism of this theory was that values had to be changed before the modernization process started, that traditional values must not be at odds with progress. Theories of Underdevelopment based on Marx’s findings, he was thinking of how societies develop in an economic analysis in a historical time. The start of manufacturing was in the 16th-18th centuries, which were funded by rich people who traded between England, West Africa and Caribbean.
The trading process started to speed up, this found European countries moving down South America to accumulate gold. This led to slavery, capitalism, and Land tenure influence of colonial powers. Marx went on to analyse why most areas were underdeveloped using Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Imperialism is when profitability declines in a in a capitalist economy and is in search of cheap labour. Imperialism dominates politically, economically and military. It introduces new technology, creating infrastructure but using cheap labour.
Criticism of Lenin’s theory is that colonialism has gone but capitalism remains. Marxists believed that lack of development was due to uneven export of capital and that capital transfers would lead to the development of capitalism in underdeveloped economies. Dependency Theory Those opposing the above mentioned criticism of the Imperialist theory was that it drained surplus value from underdeveloped countries, making it impossible for them to develop. Andre G Frank assumed that there was a chain of dependency from the metropolitan to the local elite of the underdeveloped country.