Page 200 - Culture Society and the Media

190 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA
broadcasting, on the other hand, of the kind reviewed by Carnoy (1975) or
Jamison and McAnany (1978), was already on the way to being outdated by the
trend towards greater individualization of the learning process, and with
advances in educational technology which were adapting to the demand for
individualization and flexibility, such as audio and visual cassettes, teaching
machines, programmed learning texts, overhead projectors and film loops,
portable television cameras and portable transistorized monitors. This point of
view may have been no less optimistic than the original hopes for educational
broadcasting entertained by Schramm (1964), in its assumption that new
technologies would in fact be made available on a more efficient basis than
traditional broadcasting reception equipment. Moreover, as Mattelart’s (1979)
work suggests, such technology may be all the more likely to derive from
western-based multinational companies, its design and its soft-ware carrying in-
built and politically consequential assumptions as to what educational goals should
be. In obliging teachers in the Third World to adjust their teaching curricula to the
demand for such technology this process might simply accentuate the
phenomenon of dependency.

THE QUESTION OF EFFECTS
The role of the mass media in the Third World has therefore received very
considerable attention in recent years, both from the critical perspective of
dependency theory and from that of developmentally-oriented action research.
Yet it is still the case that very little is known about actual media effects in
relation to dependency. On the one hand, some of the issues raised are too broad:
media structures are related to other components of the international structure of
dependency, yet insufficient attention is given to the impacts of specific
contents. For instance, if ‘reactionary’ western media contents do have political
impacts, it would seem, prima facie, that such impacts are curiously ineffective
in diverting popular discontent, rebellion and revolution in many countries
subjected to such contents. The impacts do not seem to rise above the structural
conditions for social disintegration. It might even be hypothesized that exposure
to western media fare tends to weaken respect for traditional authority, and is
therefore dangerous to many different kinds of regime. On the other hand, other
issues are raised that focus too specifically on narrowly defined categories of
developmentally-related programming, which pay insufficient regard, for
example, to the interaction of such programme impacts with the impacts of other
programme categories. Overall, there is a shortage of imaginative hypothesis
construction in both these two broad areas.
What research there has been on ‘media effects’ in terms of general media
impacts on values, attitudes, and behaviours is strangely repetitive of some of the
naively positivistic research, now less common perhaps in the west, in which
inferences are drawn from, say, counts of violent incidents, the proportion of all
feminine characters who appear in ‘subservient’ roles, etc. From the analysis of