Page 198 - Culture Society and the Media

188 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA
available for a station to pick up the ‘casual’ listener, and less opportunity for
listeners to estabish regular listening habits. Motivation to listen could quickly be
dissipated if presentation and reception were poor or inappropriate. In Rao’s
(1966) study of two Indian villages the number of villagers who mentioned
unintelligibility as the reason for not listening to the radio was so high that the
author advocated a major change of announcers’ vocabulary. It could be the right
language, but the level of abstraction or formality could be too great.
Presentation could influence the chances of effective implementation. Kearl
(1977) warned against the tendency for ‘scientific’ knowledge to be converted
into an unsuitable authoritarian mode of traditional knowledge in the process of
dissemination, and argued that more stress should be placed on trial and error
procedures.
By the late 1970s, therefore, it was widely considered that the conditions for
effective mass communication, in relation to the dissemination of specific
technical skills, extended well beyond the communication message itself and
involved an important measure of interpersonal communication, at least in those
societies where interpersonal communication was still the primary source of non-
local information and values. But where there was less dependence on
interpersonal communication, the mass media may have become more self-
sufficient as effective disseminators (see Schneider and Fett, 1978). The
necessary scale of investment for dissemination was considerably greater than
allowed for in original models of the media’s role in development, and often
required greater dependence on the aid programmes of international organizations
and western governments.

Media for formal education

Whereas diffusion programmes have generally been concerned with particular
kinds of skill or information for adults, it was also claimed that the mass media,
especially broadcasting, could achieve rapid improvements in a country’s formal
educational system and in the numbers it could educate. Schramm (1964)
claimed that the mass media could overcome problems of teacher shortage, and
could provide a means of education even in areas where there were not yet any
schools. Just as in the case of diffusion research, so in respect of educational
broadcasting, most of the literature appears to originate from sources committed
to these kinds of objective. But there was considerably more caution by the late
1970s than in the early 1960s. This reflected greater experience of the problems
of organizational logistics, technology and programme quality. First, the need to
deliver specific programme material at a specific time on a stated day to classes
of pupils in a particular grade in all schools of a given educational system could
cause immense logistic difficulties (Katz and Wedell, 1975), which in the
developed countries were only overcome with considerable coordination of
services and resources. Nationwide coverage, second, was difficult for
transmission reasons, especially in the case of television, which was mostly