Television & New Media

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Modernization Redux?: Cultural Studies & Development Communication Paula Chakravartty Television New Media 2009; 10; 37 originally published online Oct 7, 2008; DOI: 10.1177/1527476408325730 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tvn.sagepub.com

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Modernization Redux? Cultural Studies & Development Communication

Television & New Media Volume 10 Number 1 January 2009 37-39 © 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/1527476408325730 http://tvnm.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Paula Chakravartty University of Massachusetts

Microsoft executives have always believed that the magic of software could change the world, and many of them have witnessed firsthand how technology has solved key global problems. But high-tech innovations have largely changed lives for the small percentage of people who can afford to buy them, so Microsoft is making investments and taking action toward bringing these same benefits to the rest of the world. This effort is central to Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (UPG), which seeks to engage the more than five billion people in the developing world who have yet to experience technology’s full benefits. One part of that effort, Rural Shared Access Computing, focuses on driving relevant innovation to people who make between US$2 and $5 a day, live in rural communities and have yet to harness the potential of the information society. —Microsoft Corporation 2008

lobal media studies research has in many ways succeeded in decentering our understanding of transnational/local cultural flows and making sense of the dizzying explosion of commercial popular culture around the world. But in the global South, large parts of the transformation and rapid proliferation of mediated culture is taking place outside the main purview of the object of study in media studies. Development communication has seen a renaissance in the twenty-first century comparable to the early decades of the Cold War, when winning hearts and minds of the masses in the third world was intrinsically linked to exposure to modern commercial mass media. Contemporary discussions about the global information society are based on claims about access to “high-tech innovations” vested with the magical potential to transform the lives of individuals and communities in villages, small towns, and urban slums across the “developing world.” As the quote from Microsoft demonstrates aptly, there are clear differences between the earlier era of geopolitically charged experiments in modernization from above and current iterations emphasizing the organic synergy between corporate benevolence and local community empowerment. Behind the pragmatic and politically neutral tone of the more nuanced discourse of development, however, we see an astonishing acceleration both in the scale of development projects based on information and communication technologies and in its symbolic significance in promising a painless transition to modernity.1

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38 Television & New Media

Given that “information societies” (emerging or established) are deeply divided as often by neighborhood and regional inequities as by national and transnational borders, I argue that media studies, and especially critical cultural studies, must pay greater attention to a parallel and often understudied terrain in the globalization of the media and information industries, the arena of development communications transformed.2 In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists based more often than not at U.S. universities would travel, advise, and train policy makers and a future generation of media researchers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, on how best to accelerate modernization based on already outdated theories of social change applied to “traditional” societies. During the 1970s and 1980s, critical media scholars along with activists effectively challenged the motivations behind the paternalistic discourse of development with its ahistorical assumptions and imperial ambitions. Responding to these critiques, practitioners in the field of development communication began to solicit involvement from grassroots organizations and encourage community participation to justify more humble goals of localized social change. This newfound humility or self-reflection among conscious development communication practitioners and organizations was taking place just as the steady pace of liberalization and commercialization of new and old media systems began to change the terms of both institutional politics and everyday cultural practice across post–Cold War market societies. It is in this context of a shifting global order coupled with a sophisticated revamping of technological determinism where cultural studies approaches would be productive in analyzing both the landscape of governance and the actual practice of technologically driven pedagogic modernization. Similar to changes in the institutional make-up and convergence of the cultural industries, we can identify a series of changes in the field of transnational development. Microsoft along with their Asian, European, and Latin American counterparts in the telecom and software industries have become key players in both local and transnational development efforts. We can therefore track a change in the institutional actors who design, fund, and implement projects—whether promising to reform public education or health through digital technologies, expand e-skills and literacy to create future generation of workers, or the very re-imagination of transparent (e)governance all together. New hybrid “partnerships” between corporate, state, and civil society actors challenge our understandings of a global information society imposed from “above” or “outside.” Correspondingly, the geopolitical stakes of development communication in the twenty-first century have changed, with G8 nations often following in the lead of “trendsetters” in the new arena of development communication like Brazil, China, India, and South Africa.3 Beyond the shifts in institutional actors, media studies scholars are well positioned to critically assess the new lexicon around technology and governance. Moreover, ethnographic studies can offer meaningful critiques of the limits (also


Chakravartty / Modernization Redux? 39

possibilities) of participatory approaches and the hype around social entrepreneurship as the panacea to inequality in the global age.4

Notes 1. The renewed emphasis on communications, in this case information and communication technologies (ICTs), as central to the process of development and modernization is apparent across various multilateral, national, and regional foras. We see this in the U.N.’s efforts at identifying access to ICTs as a basic need through the Millennium Development Goals and the subsequent 2003–2005 World Summit on the Information Society. For more on the logic behind the rationale linking ICTs to the goals of development based on the modular Asian experience, see http://www.unapcict.org/ecohub/communities/mdgs 2. In Chakravartty and Zhao (2008), we argue that questions of national identity and modernity are often “relegated to the ghetto of ‘development communication’ within the U.S. academy” (p. 12)—themes we attempt to address directly in reconceptualizing debates about global media and culture in that volume. 3. It is beyond the scope of this short article to provide sufficient details regarding this significant change in the global institutional context, but for more, see Chakravartty and Sarikakis (2006). 4. Anthropologists have increasingly drawn from cultural studies to critique and engage in modernization and development both historically and in its present globalized manifestations (Escobar 1994; Gupta 1998; Tsing 2004) but have only in a few cases focused on the integral role of the media (Abu Lughod 2004) and information technologies (Ferguson 2006) in these influential works.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2004. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Chakravartty, Paula and Katharine Sarikakis. 2006. Globalization, Communication and Media Policy: A Critical Perspective. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Chakravartty, Paula and Yuezhi Zhao, eds. 2008. Political Economy of Global Communication: Towards a Transcultural Perspective. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Escobar, Arturo. 1994. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Microsoft Corporation. 2008. Microsoft Strives to Bring Relevant, Affordable and Accessible Technologies to the World’s Rural Underserved Populations. Accessed July 22, 2008, from http://www.gkpeventsonthefuture .org/ Tsing, Anna Lowenhauplt. 2004. Friction: Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Paula Chakravartty is an associate professor in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is coauthor of Globalization and Media Policy (2006) and coeditor of Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (2008).
