Development communication is a field that flourished in the Cold War era whose initial aim was to drive the mass media ‘vehicles’ in order to attain modernisation. Social change was considered a ‘unilineal process of modernisation’ (Peterson 2003:42). The ‘dominant paradigm’ associated with Lerner, Schramm and others saw the relationship between mass communication and social change in a manner that was “simple, linear, deterministic and tinged with optimism” (Melkote 1991, quoted in Peterson 2003: 43). From the mid-1970s the dominant paradigm came under increased fire for treating many poor countries as if they were tribal societies, therefore ignoring markets, bureaucracies, legal systems, and so on. This led to more ‘pluralistic’ views of social change that still characterise the field today (Peterson 2003).
A second and related tradition, known as ICTs for Development (or ICT4D), originates in computer science and for decades has attracted designers, programmers and quantitative social scientists optimistic about the possibilities opened up by the new technologies. Since the early 2000s it has been reinvigorated by the boom in mobile phone uptake around the global South, giving rise to a Mobiles for Development (M4D) offshoot (Heeks 2008).