Write short note : Role of mass media in modernisation. (1989)
Post-war development sociology assigned mass media a causal role in modernisation: exposure to media was held to remake the traditional personality before it remade institutions. That claim — the “dominant paradigm” of development communication — has been substantially revised, and India’s own record shows why.
The dominant paradigm
- Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1958) modelled a sequence running from urbanisation to literacy to media exposure to political participation. Media, he argued, is a mobility multiplier: it cultivates empathy, the capacity to imagine oneself in another’s situation, which he treated as the defining psychic quality of modern people.
- Wilbur Schramm (Mass Media and National Development, 1964) turned this into policy for UNESCO, casting media as watchman, decision-maker and teacher, and setting minimum media-density targets for developing states.
- Everett Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations, 1962) supplied the mechanism: innovations spread through adopter categories from innovators to laggards, with mass media creating awareness and interpersonal channels — opinion leaders — securing adoption.
The Indian record
- Radio: the UNESCO-backed Radio Rural Forum experiment at Poona (1952-56) organised village listening groups around broadcasts on agriculture and health. From 1965 All India Radio’s Farm and Home Units supported the High Yielding Varieties Programme so effectively that the ADT-27 paddy strain in Tamil Nadu was nicknamed “radio rice”.
- Television: Doordarshan’s Krishi Darshan, begun on 26 January 1967 for teleclubs in some eighty villages around Delhi, remains India’s longest-running television programme. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (1975-76) carried instruction to about 2,400 villages in twenty districts of six states.
- Reach today: All India Radio covers 98 per cent of the population; private satellite channels number 908; the telecom regulator recorded 1,092.79 million internet subscribers in early 2026.
The critique
- Rogers himself recanted in “Communication and Development: The Passing of the Dominant Paradigm” (Communication Research, 1976). The paradigm had located the causes of underdevelopment inside poor societies, assumed a passive receiver, and blamed non-adopters for their own poverty.
- Diffusion research produced its own refutation in the knowledge gap: information flows fastest to the already advantaged. The Green Revolution’s gains concentrated among irrigated, propertied farmers, so media widened the very disparities it was to close.
- Herbert Schiller’s cultural imperialism thesis and the UNESCO MacBride Commission’s Many Voices, One World (1980), with its demand for a New World Information and Communication Order, recast media flows as dependency rather than development.
- Indian sociology adds a conceptual correction. Yogendra Singh (Modernisation of Indian Tradition, 1973) insists modernisation is not Westernisation, and can be absorbed into tradition; M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation shows modern media serving thoroughly traditional claims to rank.
- Access still decides outcomes: rural internet penetration stood at 48.31 per 100 against urban 126.80 in early 2026, and NFHS-5 found only 24.6 per cent of rural women had ever used the internet.
Conclusion
Mass media is an enabling condition of modernisation, not its cause. It can compress the time in which new knowledge, aspirations and political identities spread, but what it spreads and who receives it are determined by the structures of property, literacy and power around it — which is why the same instruments have advanced agricultural science, women’s autonomy and religious mobilisation alike.