DEVCOM MINDSET: ARE WE READY FOR IT?
By
University of
the Philippines Open University (UPOU)
__________________________________________________________________________________
Keynote address
delivered at the International Symposium on Development Communication,
Indonesian Development Communication Forum, Bogor Agricultural University,
Bogor, Indonesia, 30-31 October 2013.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Introduction
The theme of
this symposium is “development communication for sustainable development of
rural community,” which is rather interesting and intriguing at the same
time. Interesting because the
development of rural communities is always a dynamic enterprise, and intriguing
because until today we still talk about
the concept of sustainable development, both from the point of view of
development communication.
My focus in
this address, however, is limited to the issue of devcom mindset, but I wish to
articulate this issue through two questions, namely: are we ready for a devcom mindset? or is devcom mindset even necessary? Let me articulate my points and then I will
let you decide for yourselves.
In December
2011, UPLB Professor Emeritus Nora Quebral delivered a lecture on development
communication at the London School of Economics, where she was awarded an
honorary degree for her achievements in development
communication. Her lecture was
essentially a summary of the e-Book titled Development
Communication Primer that was released in Penang, Malaysia by Southbound
Publishing Company in January 2012. This
Primer contains both Professor
Quebral’s definitions of development communication in 1971 and in 2011, four
decades apart.
In 1971,
Professor Quebral said development communication was the “art and science of
human communication applied to the speedy transformation of a country and the
mass of its people from poverty to a dynamic state of economic growth that
makes possible greater social equality and the larger fulfillment of the human
potential” (Quebral, 1971). In December 2011,
she said development communication was the “science of human communication
linked to the transitioning of communities from poverty in all its forms to a
dynamic, overall growth that fosters equity and the unfolding of individual
potential” (Quebral, 2012).
These
definitions are not drastically dissimilar.
Perhaps the fine distinction between the two might be that in the new
definition the unit of measure, as it were, is the individual, as in
“individual potential,” while in the old definition the unit of measure was
“humanity” as in the catch phrase “human potential,” which definitely was much
more difficult to measure. Besides, in
the new definition there appears to be a stronger and more definite role and
function of communication in the process of achieving social development
because “communication is linked” to the process of development, while in the
old definition communication was merely “applied” to the transformation of
society.
These two
definitions refer to possible measures that would indicate a communication
action to be development communication or otherwise. However, it is not as if a focus on a
variable identified to be part of the development communication process no
longer appears in mass communication or corporate communication activities and
efforts.
What this is
telling us is that the definition of development communication could change, as
it has many times in the last four decades, usually depending on who the
definer might be, or the context in which the definition is anchored. But, as a concept, development communication
has not changed. If anything, it has
strengthened as an academic discipline.
The definition, in spite of what appears to be some differences, minor
as they are, actually remains necessary because that is what definitions are
for, as anchor for everybody to maintain their moorings to the concept. What does change is the manner in which the
individual constructs the meaning he or
she attaches to it and its processes, which become the basis for the
development of a mindset. For example,
in the early years of devcom, I personally considered devcom as a vocation,
some kind of a calling. I still do, and
I have, in fact, stuck to that mooring much more deeply as I have learned to
view development phenomena from a more personal perspective.
In the decade
of the sixties, development meant economic development. Then, beginning in the seventies and on to
the eighties the social and even spiritual dimensions were added to the
equation. From the largely economic
development orientation in the sixties, devcom practitioners in the succeeding
decades became increasingly concerned with total human development. It was during this transformation that I
internalized at least a little bit more confidently what devcom was, given the
totality of my own experience and exposure to human conditions under varying
circumstances that I did not experience earlier on.
During the
first decade after the introduction of devcom, I was preoccupied with economic
development issues as a direct result of experience and was a bit detached from
the realities of other social and psychological dimensions of the human
development agenda during that time. This influenced my own personal concept of
what communication could do as a variable in the development equation.
Concept of a Devcom
Mindset
Now, I am
beginning to look at devcom as communication mindset rather than a mere
variable in the development equation. I
happen to believe that the guidepost for a development communicator is a
process of trying to reach the level of mental preparedness, readiness, and
willingness to pursue with single-minded confidence and commitment the achievement,
through the use of communication, of a human development purpose or
end-goal. It is a mental state that
predetermines how we might respond to and interpret a situation in order to be
better prepared to pursue it through various means of communication.
In other
words, we must be willing and prepared to pursue people’s development, whatever
it takes. That phrase “whatever it
takes”, however, must be tempered with creativity and rationality. You don’t just plunge without a clear
understanding of the problems you are committed to help solve and a clear
defensible course of action to take. You
do things deliberately based largely on a scientific understanding of the
problem situation.
For me
personally, it has come to a point where when I look at an activity I get that
feeling of connection where I can say “this is a devcom situation” or “this is
not a devcom situation.” The first time
the idea of devcom being mindset crossed my mind was in 2007 when I was
speaking before participants of an international seminar on development
communication at Kasetsart University in Bangkok (Librero, 2008). At that time I had considered devcom as
mindset at a very crude stage.
I am now
trying to look at it as a comprehensive psychological state that still defies a
formal definition, but a situation heavily influenced by what has been accepted
as the definition of development communication.
It is a situation wherein one just knows when he or she is doing
development communication work. It’s a
situation wherein you do things practically automatically without bothering
about definitions. When you consciously
go by definitions and sets of criteria in the business of the human development
enterprise, you tend to do things more mechanically, which does mean you may be
less sincere and, therefore, less effective in the ultimate analysis.
Understanding the
Communication Contagion
The
Concept of Contagion
Moving towards
achieving a devcom mindset means that we need to gain a clearer understanding
of what I have referred to as the communication contagion.
The term
contagion is used to refer to the explanation of the attitude and behaviour of
network members in the fields of
interpersonal communication, organizational communication, mass media,
communication and information technology, health communication, language
theories and linguistics, media culture and society, public relations,
advertising, marketing, consumer behaviour and such other similar fields of
study. The fundamental assumption of the
concept of contagion is that contact is provided by communication networks that
serve as mechanisms or conduits to expose people and organizations to information
and messages that affect behaviour (Burt, 1993; Contractor and Eisenberg, 1993). As a result of this exposure to this network,
it is assumed that members would develop beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and
behaviour similar to those networks to which they belong (Carley & Kaufer, 1993).
Contagion
theory, therefore, seeks to uncover the
relationships among organizational members of the network. The significance of this relationship is that
all members of the organization, the network if you will, are presumed to have
similar levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Under this condition, members of the
communication organization or network would tend to influence one another into
demonstrating similar levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour.
Applying this
conceptual framework to a communication situation, I propose that when we
communicate a specific message, there is always a focus for the communication
act which is a product of the interaction among the major strategies of
communication, of which we are not
always mindful. This communication
contagion is the influential interaction among different communication
strategies that I expounded upon during a training session at ADB in October
2011 (Librero, 2012). I referred to this
situation as the development communication, mass communication, and corporate
communication contagion, which is to say that devcom, masscom, and corcom are three
major communication strategies that I have in mind.
I refer to mass
communication as generally focused on informing and entertaining the
audience. I view mass communication as
having evolved through the practice of propaganda that further evolved into
public opinion and public relations, which eventually influenced the
development of the study of advertising.
Mass communication essentially evolved from the practice of journalism
and advertising.
I refer to corporate
communication as generally focused on informing and convincing its audience –
the stakeholders of the organization concerned.
It evolved from public relations.
I refer to development
communication as generally focused on informing and educating its
audience. Its roots may be traced back
to agricultural journalism, educational communication technology, and
advertising.
I don’t know
if those who particularly are not enamored with mass communication should be
happy, but from the point of view of a growing number of mass communication
experts in North America and even in the Philippines, there now appears to be a
crossing over from masscom to media communication or mediacom. For now, mass communication is still very
much around and I would like to refer to it as part of what I call the D-C-M contagion
(Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Devcom-Corcom-Masscom (D-C-M) Contagion.
NOTES:
Corcom and
Devcom have become independent of and more purposive than Masscom
Masscom is
slowly being overtaken by Mediacom.
The broken
lines indicate “direction of influence”
Everything
operates within the ambit of human communication
Diagram
indicates only the mediated aspects of human communication as they relate to
Masscom, Corcom, and Devcom
The
fundamental parameter for this model is that the over-all purpose of
communication is to achieve the end-goal of the specific communication strategy.
The mention of
these three communication strategies (masscom, corcom, devcom), is not
incidental but by design. Each of
masscom, corcom, and devcom has its own definition and follows specific sets of
processes and procedures in order to achieve specific purposes. However, features, characteristics,
procedures, processes, tools, and even general measurements of success are not
mutually exclusive among these three. It
is more of a zero-sum game: when you highlight devcom, you would correspondingly
lessen references to masscom and corcom; when you highlight corporate
communication, you correspondingly lessen references to masscom and devcom; and
when you highlight focus on masscom, you correspondingly lessen references to devcom
and corcom. That is what the contagion
is about.
Blurring
of the Boundaries
These various
focuses are governed largely by the initial intention of the communication
act. This communication contagion refers
to the situation whereby each of masscom, corcom, and devcom interact with and
influence one another in order to achieve the end-goal of the communication
act, or the communication strategy’s end-goals.
In the past, we have been clearly emphatic in our efforts to pursue
specific intentions for mass communication, or corporate communication, or
development communication. Today, that
seems no longer the case.
While we can
always initially say that we will do development communication, for example, in
actual practice we would be employing the methods and tools that are also methods
and tools of both masscom and corcom.
The result is a blurring of the boundaries among the three
strategies. They are differentiated
mainly by the context in which they are undertaken, but they use similar
procedures and similar tools, using similar measures of success or failure. The difference lies mainly in the focus of
intention or context.
In order to
facilitate the achievement of the objectives of, say, devcom, the communicator
could use entertainment as one of the techniques of making content more
palatable to and enjoyable for the target audience. The same thing happens in the case of
corporate communication or mass communication.
The purpose of
pointing this out is to clarify to ourselves that what we are doing
we may call development communication, but we ought to be aware that
some if not all of the techniques and procedures that we might be employing are
techniques and procedures that we also share with other strategies of
communication. In other words, these are
not mutually exclusive. We call our
communication action devcom perhaps because our dominant intention is to
educate our clientele (see communication contagion) rather than because of the
tools we use.
Need for
Systems Thinking to Achieve Devcom Mindset
There is,
however, a powerful concept that could easily galvanize the concept of devcom
mindset, and I refer to this as systems thinking. Systems thinking, according to Peter Senge
(1990), is a “conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that have
been developed over the last fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer,
and to help us see how to change them effectively.”
We may have
varied ways of looking at things and would, therefore, work out mentally our
individual approaches to certain phenomena.
In the process of doing this, we go by our training and even gut feel,
which would include but not limited to becoming generally reductionist in our
perspective. We may have become used to
thinking linearly all the time such that any time we deal with a problematic
situation our approach would generally be linear. Indeed, when the only tool you have is a
hammer, you tend to look at problems as nails. Systems thinking is a powerful perspective,
which includes a set of tools that one can use in addressing stubborn problems
in life (Pegasus Communication, n.d.).
It encourages you to “step back and see the whole picture, rather than
focusing on just its parts” (Lyneis, 1995).
In other words, systems thinking helps us explore the interdependencies
among the elements of a system in order to uncover patterns rather than simply
memorizing isolated facts.
In a simpler
way, systems thinking refers to our ability to understand and explain the
causal interrelationships of various entities affecting our focus of interest. When this becomes second nature to us, then
we tend to look at problems in their more complex nature thereby enabling us to
see significant events that are not always easy to see.
As we talk of
development communication, therefore, we become more interested in
understanding the elements of development itself and the elements of effective
human communication and how these affect one another.
When we gain a
higher level of understanding of systems theory and systems thinking, we come
to a point where we appreciate much better the focus of our concern that is
development communication and the manner in which it influences as well as
being influenced by a whole lot of seemingly unrelated factors and
circumstances. On second look, of
course, these have both direct and indirect relationships. For example, the manner in which
beneficiaries view development efforts in their community influences the way in
which communicators shall formulate a plan to promote said development efforts
in the same community. In other words,
in a simple one-on-one relationship, we can say that each influences the
other. When there are multiple variables,
however, such as in cases where there are multiple development programs and
multiple sets of beneficiaries, each one affecting the other, then we must be
able to develop in our minds a quick picture of these vast network of relationships. The way I look at it, we should be able to
generate in our minds a clear picture of how factors associated with the
problem situation and determine how these factors interact, and what those
interactions could result in. We should, as a consequence, immediately be
able to generate a quick communication reaction plan to deal with the second
generation situation. Naturally, under
these circumstances, we should, at the same time, arrive quickly at potential
effects of our communication actions so that we could also generate some kind
of plan to respond to such reactions.
This is what happens when we have developed some mastery of systems
thinking.
Concluding
Statement
I wish to
encourage everybody to refer back to the communication contagion. There is more here than simply meets the
eye. We need to do more serious
clarification and explanation of the blurring boundaries of the various
communication strategies.
Today, we find
ourselves confronted with a situation where the boundaries between general
communication approaches have become blurred.
Increasingly, these boundaries are becoming unclear mainly because these
communication approaches or strategies are now using the same tools and
procedures to achieve practically similar end-goals. The newer technologies of communication are
making this happen quickly, but I would hasten to add that this phenomenon
becomes much more easily understood if we look at it from the lens of systems
thinking.
This, I would
like to leave with you to sink your teeth in.
We need to clarify these blurring boundaries. However, if we can not, would that mean we
would be converging on the single concept of the human communication enterprise
where there would no longer be any differentiation between mass communication,
development communication, corporate communication, and the like? Would this be a preferred state of affairs
among communicators?
###
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