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THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 29
The mass media would consequently be seen as an agent for individual
mobilization as well as social cohesion – appealing to postcolonial political
leaders who had to contend with the difficult project of national integration.
The modernization mandate was based not only on an idealized
and ahistorical understanding of the state but also on a deeply gendered
logic of ‘institutionalized individualism’ (Kabeer 2003; 16). The ‘modern
man’ would be driven to achieve as an individual as opposed to follow
ascribed norms or customs, thereby spurring development, whereas the
modern woman was presumed to have even more to gain from development,
‘emancipated from the seclusion of the household’ and ‘exercising
her mind and her talents in the same way as men’ (Kabeer 2003: 19).
With national liberation struggles spilling over to civil wars spurred
on by the rival superpowers, national development organizations such
as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
and UNESCO began to make communication policy in the developing
world a priority, beginning in the early 1960s. 7 Throughout this period,
the Third World became a social laboratory for development scholars
and policy-makers in general, including communication scholars experimenting
on ‘diffusion of innovation’ to see if peasants could imagine being
entrepreneurs, if slumdwellers would use condoms and if ‘nation building’
could take place without the threat of land redistribution and political
revolution. Private firms based in the US and Western Europe saw opportunities
for expansion in areas such as telecommunications equipment
and transfer of technologies, advertising and trade in film and television
within the larger objectives of promoting development. 8 By the end of
the 1960s, USAID along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) introduced satellite television in large developing
countries like India and Brazil. By the early 1970s when these projects
were implemented, increasingly authoritarian national leaders in both
countries were anxious to stem political unrest in the form of emerging
social and political movements, allowing these agencies to test the hypotheses
of development communication on the largest of scales with the
promise of national integration. In both countries the state deployed the
‘panacea of televized education’ (Mattelart 2002: 160) while simultaneously
opening the doors to the lucrative spoils of commercial television
for domestic private industry. 9
Many scholars have documented the violence and failures of the
development decades with worldwide poverty far from disappearing
and the Orientalist discourse of development condemning the Third
World forever to the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 22;
Escobar 1994; Kabeer 2002). We argue that postcolonial political leaders
adapted the deeply Eurocentric normative assumptions of development