Designing Messages for Development Communication: An Audience Participation-Based Approach (Communication and Human Values) Book

Accessible and practical, Designing Messages for Development Communication takes the reader step by step through the process of designing audience-responsive messages in the Third World. Bella Mody takes the media producer through an audience research-based methodology to bridge the cultural and informational distance between senders and receivers. A discussion of the origins and nature of media use in national development over the last 30 years forms the introductory background against which the author reviews the current research on media effects. Mody presents audience research as a systematic device for the involvement of message receivers in decisions concerning message design, that is, what the message needs to say and how. This volume instructs development and communication planners, as well as media workers, first to listen to the audience so as to determine which information the audience needs and in what form they can process it most effectively and, then, to pretest messages before they are produced in their final form. A valuable tool for the media producer's problem of the "invisible audience" in mass communication, this volume is essential reading not only for students and teachers of development communication, but for media users and media producers who produce messages to support development.Read More