Chapter 2

Question 1

What are the defining features of participatory communication?

Answer 1

Resistance to top-down, prescribed styles of learning. Participatory communication defies singular definition.

Question 2

What is the point of view of Shirley White?

Answer 2

It is a complex and dynamic phenomenon, seen from the eye of the beholder, and shaped by the hand of powerholder.

Question 3

What is the point of view of Jan Servaes?

Answer 3

Each society must attempt to delineate its own strategy to development, based on its own ecology and culture. Therefore, it should not be attempt to blindly imitate program and strategies of other countries with a total different historical and cultural background.

Question 4

How can be seen development?

Answer 4

Development can be seen not as a universal goal, but as an integral, multi-dimensional, and dialectic process that can differ from society to society. Development means is different in different contexts, it should be up to people in those communities to define their needs and the scope, pace and nature of change, rather than external experts.

Question 5

What is the point of view of Paulo Freire?

Answer 5

The individual must form himself rather than be formed. An emphasis on self-determination and local autonomy helps to ensure both that the local community is engaged in the process of change and that the aims, design and implementation of any development projects are fully appropriate and sustainable.

Question 6

What is the particular role of media and communication in this context-specific, bottom-up, vision of development?

Answer 6

Specifically the role of communication should be, not to disseminate information in order to change individual behaviours, but to facilitate the inclusive expression of communities’ needs. Such as process involves communication that is both horizontal and dialogic, rather than vertical and monologic. In other words, communication is understood as a means of facilitating an ongoing, inclusive and multidirectional exchange between equals, rather than as a one-way of delivery of information from one-to-many.

Question 7

Why the process of communicating is particularly important in this approach?

Answer 7

Communication is not seen simply as a tool for achieving a particular objective, but as a means of empowering all members of the community to have their voices heard. Who gets to speak, about what and under what conditions are all questions that need to be considered. If communication is to play a part in enabling communities to express their own needs, then it is vital that it doesn’t reinforce existing power relations. Participatory communication must be an inclusive process in which the subaltern – or those who are most oppressed – are able to speak.

Question 8

What are the difficulties encounter with a particular vision of development?

Answer 8

If we start with a particular vision of development as being culturally specific and locally determined, then the role for communication and media is to facilitate inclusive local expression of needs. But while this may be an appealing vision of media and communication’s role in development, it leaves us with a number of difficult questions to answer.

Question 9

What are the difficult question to answer?

Answer 9

Who should take responsibility for ensuring that the process of communication is inclusive and empowering? Allowing those in already established positions of power within the community to lead the process will surely reinforce existing inequalities. Does genuine participatory communication not, therefore, require the intervention of an external facilitator or change agent, just as in the M4D approach? But to what extent is this at odds with the idea that process of change must emanate from the local community? Precisely what role should the external facilitator play and how can they avoid or at least ameliorate the inevitable inequalities in knowledge and power between themselves and the community?

Question 10

What if inclusive community participation does not result in consensus over what to do?

Answer 10

Local elites are likely to be most able to set the agenda of development projects and benefit from them. In which case, the role of the external facilitator must surely be to challenge existing power relations within the community in order to ensure that it is the most marginalized elements of the community not result in tension and discord? Actively empowering women to play a greater role in community decision-making, for example, may well be desirable for inclusive development, but if it goes against local norms and directly challenge the dominant position of men in the community then it is likely to promote conflict.

Question 11

Should we accept such conflict as an evitable consequence of promoting structural change through participatory communication?

Answer 11

Or is this not a risk worth taking, especially when the outcomes of a participatory approach can be unpredictable and difficult to control? If individuals are unwilling to participate in such activities for fear of the consequences, is it ever acceptable to coerce individuals into participating? And while participatory communication may emphasize the importance of local knowledge and aspirations, might there not be limits to how far some indigenous beliefs and practices are valued? Is there a danger of romanticizing community knowledge?

Question 12

Who is Paul Freire?

Answer 12

Has been hugely influential in this field. Freire was a Brazilian adult educator who developed a critical philosophy of education – referred to as pedagogy of the oppressed (1970) – based on his experiences of working with poor, illiterate communities in Brazil in the early 1960s.

Question 13

How his pedagogy can be applied to development communication?

Answer 13

His radical pedagogy was originally developed for education, the basic principles can be directly applied to development communication. It is worth outlining these principles in some detail here as they are often oversimplified or diluted.

Question 14

What is the starting point of Freire’s argument?

Answer 14

Belief in the existence of an unjust social order which produces both the oppressed and the oppressors. One of the principal mechanisms for maintaining this unjust social order is the existence of a particular false consciousness.

Question 15

What is a false consciousness?

Answer 15

Described as a structure of thought which blinds the oppressed from critically recognizing the causes of their oppression.

Question 16

What is the consequence of false consciousness?

Answer 16

The oppressed instead of striving for genuine liberation, can aim only to become oppressor themselves because they have been conditioned to accept that their only ideal is to resemble the oppressor.

Question 17

What is the further consequence of false consciousness?

Answer 17

The further consequence is the fear of freedom or the fear that transcending their current circle of certainty on pursuit of a more authentic existence may lead to disorder or destructive fanaticism.

Question 18

How to challenge unjust social order?

Answer 18

Seek to advance critical consciousness as a process of conscientization.

Question 19

What are the two key dimensions of this pedagogy?

Answer 19

Praxis and problem posing.

Question 20

How Freire does uses the term praxis?

Answer 20

To refer a process of reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. This process makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation

Question 21

Within this process what are the two elements always working together?

Answer 21

Reflection and action.

Question 22

What is reflection?

Answer 22

True reflection is necessary for overcoming false consciousness and will always lead to action.

Question 23

What is action?

Answer 23

Equally action constitutes authentic praxis only when it is based on critical reflection – otherwise action is pure activism.

Question 24

What is the role of communication in this cycle of action and reflection?

Answer 24

The importance of dialogue. Critical and liberating dialogue among the oppressed is central to ensuring reflective participation in the act of liberation. Any attempts at liberation which rely upon instruction and monologues, rather than dialogue will inevitably transform them into masses which can be manipulated. Propaganda, management, manipulation – all arms of domination – cannot be the instruments of their rehumanisation.

Question 25

What form should this dialogue take?

Answer 25

A second, related instrument of liberation is a problem-posing dialogue. In this form of communication, open and thought-provoking questions are used to invite participants to reflect critically and collectively on their own experiences in order to unveil the true reality of their oppression and its causes.

Question 26

What become their oppression once it is revealed through dialogue?

Answer 26

It can become a site of action. In this wat, a problem-posing dialogue is crucial for driving the cycle of praxis – because it both prompts initial critical reflection and because it subsequently maintains a cycle of action and reflection.

Question 27

What is a key dimension of this form of dialogue?

Answer 27

The rejection of conventional sources of authority. The teacher, for example, is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the student, who in turn while being taught also teaches. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. Equally, in this approach, authoritative forms of knowledge and experience derive from the everyday lives of participants, rather than prestigious or well-known examples or events that are often alien or artificial.

Question 28

How the problem-posing dialogue does stands in direct contrast with a banking type of education?

Answer 28

A banking type of education in which the role of the teacher is to deposit information into the students’ minds, and the only action of the student is to receive, file and occasionally retrieve such deposits. This form of education is characterized by the authority of the teacher over the student and the assumption that are ignorant and teachers are knowledgeable.

Question 29

What does Freire argue on the banking type of education?

Answer 29

This style of education not only leaves no room for developing critical consciousness, but that it actively works against it by encouraging students to passively accept their place in the world and the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Question 30

How these contrasting styles of education map in communication and media in development?

Answer 30

Whereas a M4D approach draws very much on a banking type of education, participatory communication should seek to promote a problem-posing dialogue in pursuit of conscientization.

Question 31

What kinds of media, if any, are appropriate for such a participatory, problem-posing style of communication?

Answer 31

The tendency of mass media, such as television, billboards and newspaper, to favour one-way communication severely limits their relevance. Instead, such critical dialogue is far better suited to media that are widely accessible and do not require certain levels of expertise, resources or (media) literacy. Such media should be able to promote local group interaction and reflection and should be owned and controlled by the community rather than by the government or elites.

Question 32

What is included in appropriate media?

Answer 32

Appropriate media may include community radio, suitable forms of video and photography, interactive posters, visual aids, traditional folk media and local materials that might facilitate dialogue such as cloth or clay.

Question 33

How inclusive critical dialogue does not depend on the use of media?

Answer 33

It may in fat be more likely to occur through interpersonal communication. Forms of interpersonal communication traditionally used in the community should be considered central to participatory communication (although they too are embedded in local relations of power). Media may well provide an important supplement to these forms of communication, but should certainly not automatically be seen as the dominant mode of participatory communication.

Question 34

What is the point of view of Denise Gray-Felder?

Answer 34

Every meaningful lesson or belief I’ve garnered in life came from someone I value explaining the issue to me and involving me in the process of figuring out the solution.

Question 35

What those interpersonal communication includes?

Answer 35

Storytelling, group meetings, singing, dancing and especially community theatre.

Question 36

What is Freire’s understanding of development and the associated role of communication?

Answer 36

It is clearly much more radical than the first account of participatory communication. Freire’s approach is also clearly incompatible with the culture of most formal development organizations. A pedagogy of the oppressed does not lend itself to straightforward measures of impact or cost-effectiveness, or to universal guidelines for designing and delivering interventions.

Question 37

What is one, pragmatic response to Freire’s theory?

Answer 37

Suggest that it may simply be too difficult to bring about the proposed change in the structural forces which it targets.

Question 38

What is Anna Colm point of view?

Answer 38

Is it even possible to run participatory projects in the current context of international development still very much Western-led and tied to logframes, donors and organisational agendas and structure? In which case, perhaps we should limit our ambitions to more realistic, smaller-scale objectives that can be achieved within existing structural constraints, albeit with a significant degree of involvement from the local community

Question 39

What are the implications for those who take a different view and accept Freire’s argument?

Answer 39

The implications are extreme. In Freire’s account, any effort to transform the situation of the oppressed which doesn’t directly address the unjust social order is a false charity which serves to preserve that order.

Question 40

What does genuine solidarity with the oppressed means?

Answer 40

Fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these beings for another. Those oppressors who genuinely wish to convert to being in solidarity with the oppressed must re-examine themselves constantly because they almost always bring with them prejudices which work against revolutionary change, such as a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want and to know.

Question 41

What does require conversion to the people?

Answer 41

A profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence, they can no longer remain as they were.

Question 42

What are the two questions if we accept that one cannot be partially or temporarily in solidarity with the oppressed?

Answer 42

To what extent are you sympathetic to Freire’s theory? If you are sympathetic, do you consider yourself to be on the side of the oppressed or the oppressor?

Question 43

What are the differences between participatory communication and diffusion?

Answer 43

While a diffusion model focuses on the diffusion of information with the aim of promoting behaviour change, a participatory approach aims to promote structural change through horizontal communication.

Question 44

What does this direct comparison is useful for?

Answer 44

Drawing attention to the very real differences in the theoretical foundations and methodological frameworks of the two approaches. It also serves to highlight the assumptions made by each approach about the nature of communication, culture, the audience and development itself. Defining participatory communication in relation to what it is not is also perhaps the most effective way of pinning down what we are actually talking about, because the notion of participatory communication is so fluid.

Question 45

How this approach of defining participatory communication also carries a number of problems?

Answer 45

Primarily, it implies that the two models of communication are mutually exclusive and that they cannot or do not interact. This is not necessarily the case. There is broad recognition that diffusion-based campaigns will not work unless they involve a significant amount of, albeit instrumental, participation of the local community.

Question 46

Why such participation is important in the early stages of project design?

Answer 46

To help to determine how relevant the proposed aims and methods are within the local context. Similarly, participatory projects often rely upon some form of information delivery and/or the teaching skills. Learning the basics of using a video camera and editing a short film for example, are best taught thorough instruction rather than problem-posing.

Question 47

What is the point of view of Nancy Morris in an analysis of 44 different development communication projects?

Answer 47

Rather than being polar opposites, the diffusion and participation approaches often informed one another – in terms of both their objectives and outcomes.

Question 48

What is the point of view of Elizabeth McCall?

Answer 48

In some United Nations organizations there is recognition that successful program initiatives can merge community dialogue processes with mass media approaches and other forms of informational and motivational communication and advocacy.

Question 49

What did find Ogan in her meta-analysis of academic articles on development communication?

Answer 49

11,4% of all projects discussed in their sample explicitly combined a modernization with a participatory framework.

Question 50

What is the point of view of Morris?

Answer 50

The distinction between participatory and diffusion approaches may be justifiably described as a false dichotomy.

Question 51

What is another problem with comparing participatory communication directly with the diffusion model?

Answer 51

It invites us to make an absolute judgement about which is the most appropriate or effective approach. Making such a judgement carries the assumption that either one is inherently or universally preferable to the other. This may not be a particularly helpful thing to do. Just as there are situations where community dialogue is preferable to the imposition of external norms, so there are circumstances where it is more appropriate to use the mass media as a tool to fill genuine and significant information gaps.

Question 52

What is the point of view of Waisbord?

Answer 52

For example, for some urgent, short-term issues, such as epidemics and other public health crises, centralized and rapid decision-making may be preferable to the inevitably slower and often conflicting outcomes of a grassroots process.

Question 53

What is the point of view of Morris?

Answer 53

What will work in the local environment is not a question of which is the superior approach. It is a question of shaping project goals to community needs and finding the most appropriate means to pursue those goals.

Question 54

What is central to Thomas Tufte and Paulo Mefalopulo?

Answer 54

The understanding of participatory and diffusion modes of communication as complementary rather than contradictory approaches is central to their multi-track model of development communication. The participatory communication paradigm does not call for a replacement of the basic communication functions associated with information dissemination, but rather broadens its boundaries to include more interactive ways of communicating (emphasis added).

Question 55

What is the multi-track model of development communication?

Answer 55

This model propose that a different track, or communication approach, should be taken according to the objectives of the initiative, local circumstances and the phrase of the project. The difference between monologic and dialogic modes of communication should be seen as an asset capable of better addressing the complexity of many situations rather than as a contradiction.

Question 56

What is the point of view of Tufte and Mefalopulos for the first phase of a development project?

Answer 56

The research phase must always be based on two-way communication methods, not matter what the purpose of the sector of the intervention. This greatly reduces the possibility of relying on incorrect assumptions and avoids the risk of alienating relevant stakeholders by leaving them out of the decision-making process. After this phase, approaches of both modes can be used according to the needs and scope of the initiative.

Question 57

What is the final reason why it may be problematic to define participatory communication in contrast to a diffusion model of communication?

Answer 57

It masks the significant variations in the ways in which participation is understood. In participation is kaleidoscopic as White describes it, rather than a unified model of communication, then surely any single definition of participation will be incomplete. Perhaps a more meaningful way of understanding the concept is by outlining some of the different, fragile and illusive understandings of participation. This is commonly achieved by identifying different categories or typologies of participation.

Question 58

What are the two major forms of participation identified by Tufte and Mefalopulos?

Answer 58

The social movement perspective and the institutional perspective. In this case, participation is seen as a tool to achieve a pre-established goal.

Question 59

Within the perspective, what are the four ways to understand participation?

Answer 59

As a mechanism for ensuring the inclusive provision of services, as a means of gathering input from civil society to pursue advocacy goals, as a way of monitoring the progress of a project or as a way of evaluating a project.

Question 60

How is defined participation in the social movement perspective?

Answer 60

Participation is defined much more broadly as an empowering process involving the mobilization of people to eliminate unjust hierarchies of knowledge, power, and economic distribution. In this perspective, the establishment of participation as an empowering process is itself the goal.

Question 61

What is another way of categorizing different understandings of participation?

Answer 61

Creating a hierarchy of interpretations.

Question 62

What is the ladder of participation of Sherry Arnstein?

Answer 62

It lists eight forms of participation – or degree of citizen’s power in determining the outcome of a project. Each form of participation is categorized into one of three levels.

Question 63

What is the premise of this hierarchy?

Answer 63

The farther up the ladder you go, the greater genuine involvement participants have in decision-making.

Question 64

What are the forms of participation at the bottom of the ladder?

Answer 64

Such as manipulated and therapy participation, constitutes forms of non-participation or contrived practices which may give the illusion of participation but which only involve participants in an attempt to engineer their support for an outcome that has already been determined.

Question 65

What is the pseudo-participation?

Answer 65

Manipulation and therapy.

Question 66

What are the tokenistic form of participation?

Answer 66

Informing, consultation and placation are described as tokenistic forms of participation, which, although allowing participants to have some say in the process, do not contain mechanisms which actually ensure that their contributions will influence the outcomes.

Question 67

What are the degrees of tokenism?

Answer 67

Informing, consultation and placation.

Question 68

What are the forms of participation at the top of the ladder?

Answer 68

They afford increasing levels of involvement in actual decision-making, ranging from the ability to negotiate with those in power (partnership), to having full or majority decision-making power (citizen control).

Question 69

What are the degrees of citizen power?

Answer 69

Citizen control, delegated power and partnership.

Question 70

What is the point of view of Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron?

Answer 70

He does see real value in the looseness of the term arguing that the eagerness for labels and encapsulated definitions could only contribute to freeze a communication movement that is still shaping itself, and that may be more valuable precisely because of its variety and looseness.

Question 71

What is the point of view of Robert Huesca?

Answer 71

He sees this lack of clarity in more sinister terms, arguing that the concept of participatory communication is subject to loose interpretation that appears at best to be variable and at worst misused and distorted.

Question 72

Does preserving the ambiguity of this term not serve primarily to maintain its rhetorical value?

Answer 72

As long as the precise meaning of the term participation remains unclear, its association with ideas like equality and self-determination will be used to mask the adoption of practices that are, in reality towards the lower end of Arnstein’s ladder. It is commonly observed that the term has been used to legitimize the continuation of practices associated with the M4D approach.

Question 73

What is the point of view of Paulo Escobar?

Answer 73

The call for participation in the 1970s was easily co-opted by the establish system and rendered ineffective or counterproductive. It is on this basis that participation has been accused of becoming the new tyranny in development and of being a double agent of deception because of its redeeming effect on top-down, modernization practices

Question 74

What are the links between new technologies and participatory communication?

Answer 74

Associated claims that new media provide greater opportunities for engagement and participation of individuals and communities are now commonplace. There is something distinctive about the inherent properties of new technologies, which lend themselves to facilitating participatory communication.

Question 75

What are the examples of the use of new technologies in participatory communication?

Answer 75

Protest movements, humanitarian responses and elections.

Question 76

What is the central thesis of Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society?

Answer 76

A new global social structure is being created, which refers to as the network society because it is made of networks in all the key dimensions of social organisation and social practice. This transformation is being driven by new digital technologies which have helped to overcome the traditional limitations of networking organization and which have instead powered social and organisational networks in ways that allowed their endless expansion and reconfiguration.

Question 77

Why does Castell use mass self-communication?

Answer 77

To describe the rise of a new form of mass, multi-modal, socialized, self-generated, sef-directed and self-selected communication, which new technologies have permitted. The communication foundation of the network society is the global web of horizontal communication networks that include the multimodal exchange of interactive messages from many to many both synchronous and asynchronous.

Question 78

What are the similarities between the interactive, horizontal networks of communication characteristic of mass self-communication and the characteristics of participatory communication in development?

Answer 78

Mass self-communication has enabled new forms of counter-power or the capacity by social actors to challenge and eventually change the power relations institutionalized in society. The greater the autonomy provided to the users by the technologies of communication, the greater the chances that new values and new interests will enter the realm of socialised communication so reaching the public mind. Thus, the rise of mass self-communication enhances the opportunities for social change, without however defining the content and purpose of such social change.

Question 79

What is the point of view of Clay Shirky?

Answer 79

New technologies have made group interaction and group action, outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations, ridiculously easy. New technologies have caused a collapse in the costs (time and effort) of creating new group or joining an existing one. This fact, combined with hat he describes as our native talent for group action has led to a remarkable increase in our ability to share to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action. By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort.

Question 80

How Shirky applies his broad account of the affordances of new technologies to the context of participatory communication in social change?

Answer 80

In The Political power of social media, he offers an environmental view of social media as a long-term tool for strengthening civil society and the public sphere. By spreading, not just media consumption, but media production as well, it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views. The Internet provides not just greater access to information compared to other media, but also a far greater access to conversation.

Question 81

How Shirky does applies his idea to the two step flow model of communication?

Answer 81

Whereas mass media may be crucial to the first step social media amplify the second.

Question 82

How social media have a particular tendency to promote anti-hierarchical forms of group coordination within political movements?

Answer 82

The way social media enable messages to be spread rapidly though social networks, he argues, creates a shared awareness of a situation. This shared awareness can not only mobilize political movements quickly but also horizontally – in the form of loosely coordinated publics which don’t rely on conventional, institutional, hierarchies.

Question 83

What are the characteristics of new technologies which may suggest a tendency to encourage participatory communication?

Answer 83

A propensity to promote interactivity and debate, to facilitate decentralized, flat, networks which do not rely on institutional structures, as well as a tendency to promote greater individual autonomy in communication.

Question 84

What is the point of view of Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain?

Answer 84

Digital media had a causal role in the Arab Spring because, among other thing, they allowed communities to realise that they shared grievances and because they nurtured transportable strategies for mobilizing against dictators. New technologies also appear to offer us the ability to communication much more freely across national and cultural boundaries.

Question 85

How Evgeny Morozov does defines cyber-utopianism?

Answer 85

A naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside. Indeed, it is equally possible to identify a number of other apparent properties of new technologies which appear to work against their suitability for participatory communication.

Question 86

What is the nature of new technologies and the resources capabilities?

Answer 86

Required to make use of them can mean that it is only those who are technologically privileged who can take part in the forms of communication which they permit.

Question 87

What can be seen as the persistence of inequality in access to Internet?

Answer 87

In 2013, an estimated 39% of the world’s population had access to the internet. While such statistics are often interpreted as evidence that the internet has been brought to nearly every corner of the globe they can equally be seen as further evidence of the persistence of stark inequalities in access. Although 75% of people in Europe may be online, the same is true for just 16% of people in Africa.

Question 88

Why a grossly uneven distribution of access is even more apparent within societies?

Answer 88

Technologies of mass self-communication are generally more expensive to buy and maintain (and they can also become obsolete relatively quickly and need replacing). They also require users to have the time and sufficient (media) literacy to use them. Even if users are able to get online, they may struggle to find locally relevant content in appropriate language.

Question 89

What is the inevitable consequence of access to new technologies?

Answer 89

The most marginalized are excluded from access. This is clearly not conductive to participatory communication. It does not follow that providing greater access to new technologies or bridging the digital divide is necessarily the solution. Uneven access to the internet is a symptom of wider social, political and economic inequalities and the provision of new technologies alone will not solve this.

Question 90

How new technologies afford repressive governments new opportunities to monitor public and private communications and to suppress dissent?

Answer 90

Digital surveillance is far cheaper and faster than the old analog techniques of wiretapping and bugging one’s home and office. Breaking into the account of just one activist or journalist could quickly lead to entire networks of friends and associates, compromising the security of dozens of people.

Question 91

Why ties between individuals within a network sustained by social media are much weaker than the ties between individuals offline?

Answer 91

Because it affects the resulting forms of collective action which such groups can engage in. whereas strong ties are required for high-risk (offline) activism that explicitly confronts socially entrenched norms and practices, the weak ties sustained by social media produce little more than clicktivism.

Question 92

What is clicktivism according to Gladwell?

Answer 92

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. Social media may increase levels of participation, but only because participation is made easier, not because people are more motivated to take part.

Question 93

What is clicktivism according to Shirky?

Answer 93

While clicktivism may exist, it doesn’t mean that those individuals who are committed cannot also use social media to coordinate real-world action.

Question 94

Why new technologies may be less suitable to long-term political organization and mobilization?

Answer 94

While the political mobilizations in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 may have demonstrated that new technologies can certainly enable groups to coordinate responses to events rapidly and en masse, events thereafter have suggested that such technologies may be less suitable to long-term political organization and mobilization. While social media may lower the cost of co-ordination of social movements and enable group mobilization based on ad hoc synchronisation, they also produce undisciplined or loosely organized groups which lack the means of sustaining political mobilizations in the longer term.

Question 95

What does Gladwell argue regarding effecting systematic change over the long term?

Answer 95

A centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority are necessary for thinking and acting strategically and such strategic thinking is necessary for effecting systematic change over the long term. The instruments of social media make it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Question 96

How the individualistic logic of social media can work against collective forms of participation?

Answer 96

According to Natalie Fenton and Veronica Barassi, although the individualistic logic of social media may promote self-expression among individuals, which may contribute to participatory communication and political action, this logic can also work against collective forms of participation. By enabling individual creative autonomy, social media may, among other things, inhibit the construction of a collective voice and of a collective symbolic identity within political groups; both of which are central to the development collective action. Do social media do no more than serve ego-centred needs and reflect practices structured around the self even in the nonmainstream world of alternative media? These practices may be liberating for the user but not necessarily democratizing for society?

Question 97

Why new technologies might encourage self-segregation and polization?

Answer 97

Since new technologies provide us with more control over what we consume and whom we interact with, we are increasingly able to satisfy our tendency to prefer more comfortable, self-affirming interactions with those already in our in-groups, rather than those who might challenge our existing views.

Question 98

What is the consequence of this?

Answer 98

According to Cass Sunstein, increased deliberation among like-minded people is likely to promote both more extreme views and greater consensus within those groups (or a lack of diversity).

Question 99

What does old media offer?

Answer 99

Old media may offer audiences less choice over whom to interact with, by confronting us (collectively) with people and experiences which we might not otherwise seek out, they may (inadvertently) promote a greater degree of mutual respect and collective deliberation.

Question 100

What is internet-centrism?

Answer 100

Technological determinism, assuming that the nature of the technology alone will drive change. According to Morozov, it is the belief that it will shape every environment that it penetrates, rather than vice-versa. According to Castell, the medium, even a medium as revolutionary as the internet, does not determine the content and effect of its messages. Such internet-centrism treats the internet as a constant and diverts attention away from the many forces that are shaping the internet – not all of them for the better.

Question 101

What is media essentialism?

Answer 101

According to Don Slater, the idea that (new) media have intrinsic properties, independent of their social contexts, that are fixed and universal (rather than emergent and relational) and whose impact can be observed and measured in any given location. Slater suggests replacing terms like media and new media which are associated with a particular Northern view of the world with the emptier notions of communicative assemblages and communicative ecology.

Question 102

What is one response to accusations of internet-centrism and media essentialism?

Answer 102

Focus, not on the affordances or impacts of new technologies, but on what each individual context requires and whether and how technology can play a role in this.

Question 103

What is the suggestion of Rebecca MacKinnon?

Answer 103

Stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression, and to move on to much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed and used to maximise the good it can do in the world, and minimise the evil.

Question 104

What are the implications for the role of the facilitator?

Answer 104

Broadly speaking their role is to act as a catalyst in the empowerment of others who are different from themselves, without controlling the process and while maintaining a genuine respect for local knowledge. This is not easy particularly because of the marls of their origin they inevitably bring with them.

Question 105

What is the argument of Servaes?

Answer 105

Aside from class and organizational interests, the attitude of the facilitator – and large egos and self-righteousness in particular – is perhaps the major obstacle to participation. Participatory communication requires first of all changes in the thinking of communicators. The needles and targets of development communication models, combined with self-righteousness, titles, and misdirected benevolence, often render experts a bit too pompous and pushy. Perhaps this is because it requires much more imagination, preparation and hard work to have dialogical learning.