The Idea of Westernization

Abstract

Voices — an NGO that advocates the use of media as a vehicle of empowerment and an agent for social change-has been working since the turn of the millennium, in partnership with UNESCO and another NGO called ‘Myrada’, on a pilot project in a poor village in India, located about three hours from Bangalore. The project aims to aid local development by using audio production as a platform for community-based media. It employs a wide spectrum of technologies, from the Internet to megaphones, and involves everything from training people to use computers, to setting up an audio production center designed to serve the village. Participants, organized primarily by local ‘self-help groups’, are given the technical skills to create local content. They are encouraged, for example, to surf the web looking for valuable material and then to repackage that information into an audio format that can be made available to the wider community. Due to India’s licensing regulations, the community is not allowed to broadcast its own radio programs, so local producers employ a variety of low-tech solutions including audiocassettes, loud speakers and cablecast to reach their target audience. In this way, the village is able to gain access to material which they themselves deem useful to their existence. Examples include the weather forecast, information on government schemes, knowledge of healthcare issues and strategies for dealing with drought.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls… It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image…Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

— Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto