Communicators For Development, Social Media Should Be At Your Beck & Call!

Of the 5 Os – Obstacles, Opportunities, Options, Outputs and Outcomes – I am talking Options here.

Via email from Academia, I have just downloaded Communication For Development And Social Change, a book edited by Jan Servaes (429 pages). Right under “Introduction,” Mr Servaes quotes Everett Rogers in 1976:

Development Communication is the study of social change brought about by the application of communication research, theory, and technologies to bring about development.... Development is a widely participatory process of social change in a society, intended to bring about both social and material advancement, including greater equality, freedom, and other valued qualities for the majority of people through their gaining greater control over their environment.

Now then, the Mission of DevCom is Social Change, the Vision being Development. Mr Rogers is saying development is “intended to bring about both social and material advancement.” Then, the College of Development Communication, DevCom, of UP Los Baños has not been living up to the mandate of using communication to help bring about advancement of people socially and materially!

Nonetheless, I do not agree with “human rights” and “gender equality.” Village development must be considered above human rights, that is, the ultimate application of the United Nations’ Principle of Sustainability: economic viability, technical feasibility, environmental soundness, and social acceptability.

ComDev or DevCom, we are talking of development of villages. Remember, “It takes a village to nurture a child.” In the Philippines, we are better off than many countries in terms of gender equality, the female here already morerespected than the male, alleluia!

We should now be quite busy with social media for social development. Milena Peisker has the perfect description of what ComDev should be all about in the very title of her 2011 review article, “The Communication of Participation” with the subtitle, “An Exploratory Study Of The Effects Of Social Media On Social Change[1],” and among other things, she concludes: “Social media does not cause social change.” I qualify:

Only society can cause social change, but social media should be able to catalyze social change.

That is what I am after. So, now I’m looking at Facebook and my favorite social media, blog. I use Blogger.com. Facebook and/or Blogger.com, we should all be able to cause society to proceed to change, in this case, in PH Agriculture.

So, currently I have this new blog, I, The Wizard Of Os, where you are reading this 517-word essay (including title). Blogging is where I have persisted, since 2005, in trying “to change the world,” if only the world of thinking.

Which brings me to the “New Thinking for Agriculture” espoused by PH Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie, the thinking encouraged emanating from what Manong Willie calls “The Eight Paradigms,” which are: modernization, industrialization, export promotion, consolidation of farms, infrastructure, higher investments, legislative support, and roadmap development.

Cultivating social change in agriculture via social media is actually Goliath challenges, plural. Are you Davids enough to join? Use your head!

Differently, to encourage you, look at the above image, from Shutterstock.@517

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[1]http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/pdf/participant-papers/2011-symposium/The-Communication-of-Participation-an-exploratory-study-of-the-effects-of-social-media-on-social-change-Milena-Peisker.pdf