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).

Resulta complicado concluir un artículo que aborda un proceso en marcha e ir más allá de las tendencias enunciadas previamente. No obstante, constatamos cómo “lo digital” es un territorio de interés creciente para las marcas y para la Investigación de Mercado, y en los próximos años veremos una consolidación de la investigación cualitativa online en términos de cuota de mercado (aunque mantendrá su carácter minoritario, frente a las cifras de la investigación cuantitativa).
Por otro lado, y al igual que sucedió en el cuantitativo online, veremos cómo crece el pull de empresas proveedoras de servicios cualitativos. Pensamos en plataformas desarrolladas de forma específica para la investigación y que vayan más allá de las funcionalidades diseñadas desde cliente.
Y, por último, desde la academia y desde la empresa se abre un reto para trabajar en la fundamentación teórica de estas metodologías. Un reto para el que este artículo espera ser un pequeño grano de arena.

When instructors follow the banking concept of education, they continue to exercise power over students by depositing information (Freire, 1970). Shor elaborates:
“There is a reassuring simplicity in the old ways of teaching. They may not work very well, but they are a solid tradition to fall back on—the hour-long lesson, the documented lecture, the Socratic discussion, the course outline and sturdy reading list, the separate canon for each academic discipline, the term paper and final exam. It is well organized and very busy. The irony of this order is not simply the static knowledge it produces, but also the alienation it provokes. (1980, p. 122)”
Instructors who follow such an approach prevent students from learning from their own lived experiences. In contrast, critically-minded instructors make themselves vulnerable, both by engaging in reflexive writing about their own pedagogical practice, and by sharing their feelings and insecurities with their students. The experience also creates vulnerabilities for students, who are asked to share their own thoughts about hegemony in the classroom. Such an experience is uncomfortable for both parties, because it differs greatly from the hegemonic, yet familiar, “banking concept of education” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). However, only through the discomfort of making oneself vulnerable can an instructor and his or her students transform the classroom and realize the potential of critical communication pedagogy.
If instructors take critical communication pedagogy seriously, desiring to work toward positive change in their classrooms, reflexivity about classroom oppression becomes worth the effort. Shor echoes this idea:
“When we think critically about our action, then we can act critically on our thinking. Teaching is the most important social practice of intellectuals, so reflection on pedagogy can do a lot in extraordinarily redesigning the ordinary work of a teacher. (1980, p. 123)”
Thus, instructors who desire to create a classroom environment that examines power can follow the two steps advocated in this article: naming and critically reflecting on sociocultural problems (autoethnography), and acting to create change (critical communication pedagogy). This process affords opportunities for instructors to become better facilitators of learning, first by empowering their students, and then by creating change in their classrooms (the micro level), and in the educational agencies of society (the macro level). In sum, this work demonstrates that autoethnographic writing about pedagogical practice can be pragmatic scholarship that bridges the gap from critical communication pedagogy as ideology to critical communication pedagogy as praxis.

Researchers developed the SMCC model as a framework for crisis communication management in the changing media landscape ( [Jin and Liu, 2010] and [0150] —see Fig. 1). The model is divided into two parts that explain (1) how the source and form of crisis information affect organizations’ response options and (2) recommended social-mediated crisis response strategies. For crisis information source, the model depicts the interaction between a given organization experiencing a given crisis and three types of publics who produce and consume crisis information via social media, traditional media, and offline word-of-mouth communication: (1) influential social media creators, either individuals or other organizations, who create crisis information for others to consume; (2) social media followers who consume the influential social media creators’ crisis information; and (3) social media inactives, who may consume influential social media creators’ crisis information indirectly through offline word-of-mouth communication with social media followers and/or traditional media who follow influential social media creators and/or social media followers, either individuals or other organizations. At the center of the model is the given organization in a given crisis, which also is a source. Therefore crisis information sources can be divided into two categories: from the organization and from a third party outside of the organization. When multiple organizations are involved in a crisis situation, each organization can position itself as the focal organization in the center of this model to evaluate and respond to the crisis.

Full-size image (60K)
Fig. 1.

Social mediated crisis communication model.

Within the organization octagon featured in the model are five factors that affect how organizations communicate information before, during, and after crises: crisis origin, crisis type, infrastructure, message strategy, and message form, which emerged from the literature and interviews with 40 crisis managers (Liu et al., in press). Two of these factors are explored in this study: crisis message form and strategy along with the previously discussed crisis information source variable.

Crisis information form is whether the crisis information is transmitted via traditional media, social media, and/or offline word-of-mouth communication (Liu et al., in press). To understand how the organization can best position itself as the preferred source for crisis information, crisis managers need to understand how crisis information form and source affect publics’ levels of acceptance of different organizational crisis response strategies. The next section discusses crisis message strategies included in the SMCC model, which leads to us asking:

Research Question 1a. What are the effects of crisis information form (i.e., offline word-of-mouth, social media, and traditional media) on publics’ levels of acceptance of different organizational crisis response strategies?

Research Question 1b. What are the effects of crisis information source (i.e., third-party and organization) on publics’ levels of acceptance of different organizational crisis response strategies?

To help answer these questions, the second part of the SMCC model combines situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and applied social media research to provide suggested organizational response strategies for social-mediated crises.

The very term ‘community’ offers various and misaligned interpretations: acting as a warning signal for mawkish provincialism; providing a rallying cry for grounded, on practical-minded activism; or conceptualizing high-minded obligations towards the civil realm. And while the instinctive responses of elite policy-makers might revert to the first of these three, ‘community’ is a difficult aspiration to be outwardly rude about. It is, of course, permissible to ask whether a ‘community’ is being represented honestly, but successful ‘community in practice’ is met with back-slapping approval and staged ministerial walk-abouts. It is comparatively recently that such negatively charged collectives as ‘the terrorist community’ have become thinkable, and even now they are regularly held up to ridicule in the satirical magazine Private Eye. Thanks to this largely
undiminished status as a force for the good, ‘community’ has long been a staple of vacuous government initiatives and the systematic misrepresentation of the marginalized by self-styled ‘community leaders’. Without exception, the chapters in this collection rise well above ‘community’ as palliative populism or a vehicle of special interest. As Janey Gordon makes clear in the introduction, even past academics (generously unnamed) have been guilty of a ‘sugary view’ of community media: and there is to be none of that in this collection. But nor is there to be a corrosive cynicism. So where the book turns to the possibilities of community empowerment, such as in the chapter by Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart and Kerrie Foxwell, what emerges is a sober and evidence-based assessment, that places the outcome of user focus groups alongside discussion of national media policy and market constraints.

el segundo capítulo y otras referencias a la comunicación de comunidades

La mayor crítica formulada al paradigma alternativo es quizá lo que se considera una mirada utópica, o romántica como la denominan algunos autores, a los procesos de desarrollo. Por ejemplo, las referencias al concepto comunidad tienden a
desconocer los conflictos y tensiones naturales de los procesos comunitarios. Así mismo, la posibilidad de replicar procesos exitosos a nivel local no siempre es factible en entornos de mayor complejidad y envergadura.
Otra de las críticas al paradigma alternativo se desprende de la diversidad de acepciones que se manejan sobre el término participación y las dificultades para poder desarrollar procesos participativos consecuentes con los postulados del modelo. El concepto participación incluye diversos tipos y niveles, cuya aplicación a menudo conduce a una falsa o limitada participación y, por el contrario, reduce la posibilidad de toma de decisiones. Por otra parte, en ocasiones también se maneja una visión idealista de la participación y se asume que esta es deseada o aceptada en todos los entornos socio-culturales.
Ver link 1
Con relación a las perspectivas comunicativas usadas en este modelo generalmente se han orientado a las dificultades relacionadas con los procesos de monitoreo y evaluación que muchas veces no se acomodan a las lógicas de planeación y ejecución de proyectos propuestas por agencias y donantes a nivel internacional.
Ver link 2

[conclusiones a la contextualización de la investigación de comunicación, fragmento en G Books]