7-2 The Electronic Era

Video and Cultural Awareness

An Egyptian Experience Information technologies could help solve some of the most pressing problems of developing "Third World" nations by facilitating better education and training through access to knowledge. However, is it possible for a culture to assimilate the new communication technologies without being destroyed in the process? Video, in particular, can be a uniquely appropriate and…

Uganda - Creating a Refugee Crisis

Although advances in communications technology are widely heralded as evidence of progress by the world community; major events of dramatic impact continue to occur virtually unnoticed. In October 1982, tens of thousands of people in southwest Uganda were uprooted and forced to flee their homes. Their plight is little known by the public due to the isolation of the areas involved, but its causes…

The Texture of Change

Yoruba Cultural Responses to New Media Even the casual visitor to the Nigerian capital of Lagos in West Africa is immediately confronted with mass media and its attendant technologies. On the road from the airport into teeming Lagos with its close to two million inhabitants, billboards advertise Kodak color film and black and white television sets that "think like color." Local hawkers ply their…

The Development of Consciousness

A New Approach to Participatory Media Community developers, media planners, and people with varying political interests have long been intrigued with mass media's capacity to educate. In recent years cable television and video have given many more people the opportunity to raise and address issues that concern them. However, media attention alone doesn't solve complex social and political…

Satellites - Latin American Frontier

By the end of this decade most of rural Latin America will be incorporated into major national and international telecommunication networks. In this sudden, quantum leap to space-age telecommunications, indigenous communities living in rural, "frontier" areas, whose experience with television and even radio has been minimal or nil, will become "linked" to satellite technology. The modernization…

Radio for Nepal's Teachers

Nepal is among the poorest countries in the world. Fifty-one percent of the children suffer from malnutrition and 54 percent of the adults in the country may be stunted as a result of prolonged malnutrition. The population growth rate is 2.6. Infant mortality reaches 30 percent in parts of the Kingdom. Valuable natural resources such as trees and topsoil are rapidly disappearing. Major…

Media Autonomy in the Third World

No Win Spending a day in the Philippine national archives, a Malaysian kampong on the Bruneian ulu, an afternoon with Third World students or an evening in a Trinidadian calypso tent, can make the culturally-sensitive visitor aware of the impact of Western-type mass communications upon Third World peoples. A number of examples show the wide-ranging effects: * In the early nineteenth century, when…

Marcos' New Information Order

With a single call on "Metrocom" from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Manila branch of the national police, an embarrassing newspaper can be shackled. Marcos has played cat and mouse with the once "freest press in Asia" for the past 10 years - recently closing the opposition newspaper, We Forum. But even Marcos' control of the Philippines media is small compared to the transnational…

Introduction: "Global" communications are a Western soliloquy…

The U.N. declared 1983 the Year of Communications. For the world's tribal groups and ethnic minorities, the effects of the new communications age are mixed. While roads, short-wave radios and telephones have improved vital services, such as medical treatment, available to many groups, military communications equipment now allows armies in countries such as Guatemala, Afghanistan and Ethiopia to…

Film and the Third World

Cinema has emerged as the most alluring and expensive communications medium of the century. No other art form has been disseminated so effectively, or has appeared to transcend so many national and cultural boundaries. Unlike other art forms, films are created solely for mass distribution. Every member of every audience can witness "the real thing." Television technology and exhibition…

Corporations and Advertising

Advertising's presence is everywhere. It shapes social change and affects people's views of the world. As a major channel between producers and consumers, world advertising is dominated by a few multinational agencies who spend the most money and structure the industry by developing and providing the advertising "package" needed by multinational corporations to sell products. Multinational…

Advertising and Global Culture

No one can travel to Africa, Asia, or Latin America and not be struck by the Western elements of urban life. The symbols of transnational culture - automobiles, advertising, supermarkets, shopping centers, hotels, fast food chains, credit cards, and Hollywood movies - give the, feeling of being at home. Behind these tangible symbols are a corresponding set of values and attitudes about time,…

The Final Weapon

Rex Howitt is a Missouri farmer. For the past two years Rex has planted corn. Unwittingly he has planted the seeds of destruction for tribal people in Guatemala and Ethiopia. The US government buys part of Rex's corn. It then sells much of this corn to other nations. Part of the corn, however, is given for refugee, famine and disaster relief. While some of the corn goes directly to these crisis…

The Badui of Java, Indonesia

The Badui call themselves Urang Kanekes. Urang means people in Sundanese, Kanekes is the name of their sacred territory, located in the Kendeng Mountain in south Banten, Java. The Badui rely on controlled interaction with the outside world to maintain the tradition of their group and to resist Islamisation. The ability of the Badui to maintain their mysterious image by restricting communication…

Observations from Guatemala

In counterinsurgency warfare, victory is rarely definitive. In Guatemala the Left has been fighting off and on for at least twenty years. The army may temporarily secure roads, and cordon off administrative centers of outlying communities, however, roads are always vulnerable and such administrative centers soon become void of civic life. In the end, an army that cannot readily see its enemy…

Indians and the Guatemalan Revolution

It is generally known that until very recently Guatemalan Indians have not been active participants in the extensive revolutionary activity of that country, despite revolutionist claims and desires to the contrary. Their involvement, for example, in the revolutionary government of 1944-54 was minor. The complete failure of the Patzizia Indian revolt of 1945 alone would suggest this, but there is…

Djibouti - A Model for Repatriation?

One out of every two refugees today is African. The enormity of Africa's refugee crisis has incited international observers to take a hard took at how refugees are being handled by governments and international assistance agencies. The following case study of Ethiopian refugees in Djibouti, based on information collected by CS's Refugee Research Project, raises issues vital to refugee situations…