The spread of mass media in the developing nations after World War II generated early visions of intellectual liberation and self-actualization for untold millions of rural villagers and urban slumdwellers (see, for example, Lerner, 1958; Pye, 1963). Such visions soon faded. Development administrators found more urgent tasks at hand. They assigned communication specialists and researchers to work out ways of utilizing the mass media not as liberators of minds but as instruments of persuasion. The era of what Schramm (1964) called "the great campaigns" was under way, and it has not ended.
Media audiences in the Third World came to be seen as subjects in large-scale social experiments involving various combinations of media and messages designed to change their ways of thinking and acting in directions deemed to be in their best interests by foreign aid supervisors, ministry officials, or project managers in fields such as agriculture and public health. Audiences also have been cast in a passive role in much of the critical literature about media imperialism and demands for a New World Information Order (surveyed by Smith, 1980b) - though they are depicted not as beneficiaries of enlightening messages but as victims of cultural domination imposed upon them by the West.
Most discussion about mass communication in developing societies in recent years has been carried on by planners, politicians, commentators, and researchers from the point of view of their own strategic and ideological priorities. Little notice has been paid to the possibility that people in the Third World might prefer to make their own decisions about the role of the media in their lives. It Is our aim in this paper to examine the validity of the passive audience assumption and to consider a different conception of audiences—particularly in rapidly developing societies—as selective users of the media for their own purposes. Accordingly, we shall utilize data gathered over the past decade on media behaviors and motivations of urban and rural adults in Venezuela, a nation which has experienced an acceleration of the media expansion processes that have been taking place to varying degrees over much of the Third World. |