Essay on the communication revolution: blessing or burden the twentieth century has seen a remarkable revolution in communication and information technologies. The nineteenth century saw the advent of the telegraph, the telephone and the camera along with the development of the automobile. But it is in our century that the giant leap was made into the sky with the help of the aero plane, radio, television, satellite communication and planetary travel. While it has brought people together and fostered a feeling of global village, it also provokes fears of cultural invasion and invasion of privacy. The dilemma of the phenomenal advances of communication is at one level to find out how much of entertainment and consumption produce true contentment and at another to discover how much of information yields true wisdom. But like every other invention of man, the communication revolution has its uses as well as misuses. It has been an eventful century, a century which has witnessed the collapse of the european empires that had held the various continents under their sway, a century in which another empire rose and fell the soviet union, a century in which the atom was split and its awful potential demonstrated, proving that the smallest of small can be more powerful than the biggest.

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There is yet another the microchip, also small, also potent, which bears out the poet's averment that the world can be seen in a grain of sand and eternity held in the palm of one's hand. It began when the hunter painted pictures of animals on the walls of his cave it took a step forward when speech was invented and a further one when early societies carved symbols first on stone, then on pottery, papyrus, palm leaf, birch bark, cloth and paper, to record individual impressions and feelings. Then came printing by wooden blocks and later by movable types and identical copies could be prepared of communications and books.

The vedas were books, the dharmapada was a book, the bible was a book, the kuran was a book. They bore out what bacon said of books that they cast seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. The book was not the vehicle only of safe and comforting ideas but ideas that could and subvert authority and prevalent norms. That is why the church and the state devised censorship and book burning even before books were mass produced by the simple that gutenberg and his followers conceived.

The communication giant grew up in the nineteenth century with the advent of the telegraph, the telephone and the camera along with the development of the automobile the steam locomotive had been assembled a century earlier. He has at his command machines which have extended the capacity of his memory and is speed of recall a million times. Entire which normally would have required multi storey buildings libraries can now be stored in a cabinet? the must complex sums can be solved in the wink of an eye. There is no disagreement over the fact that information and communication are vital input for any security. The role of communication in health care, family planning and many other aspects of the quality of life cannot he exaggerated the knowledge base science and technology is the most important thing in the present day society and so how knowledge is spread and made use of by various sections of the society becomes an extremely crucial consideration. This places immense responsibility on the groups/agencies, particularly development agencies and action groups, who collect information, analyze and then communicate it to the society.

Those for whom the developmental programmes are meant should have full information about the various projects and programmes launched for their benefit by the government. Have proved to be of great potential in information transfer, motivation, agenda setting, training, mobilization and feed back and feed forward loop. The needed techno logy is available and what we need is imaginative software and the use of media that can address both demand and supply issues.

Communication strategies have the ability to narrow down the socio economic gap between the various segments of the society, even without major structural changes at the macro level. Radio and television have been praised for their contribution to making participatory democracy meaningful. But in their early years, they also presented a temptation to the state to use them for the implantation of qualities, of attitudes that it considered most desirable. The attitude most desired, whatever the complexion of the state in terms of its objectives, was docile acceptance. Hitler and goebbels used radio to propagate doctrines of one race, one nation and one leader. And in the eastern end of europe, the communists used their radio and television for thought control, evoking in george orwell the terror and the nightmare of the big brother watching every citizen. Thirty five years and many million deaths after orwell wrote his nineteen eighty four came the real 1984 and found the big brother sadly sapped of his certitude.

The cause obviously is the failure of the economic system of the eastern bloc to provide the goods to meet the needs which no amount of propaganda could cover up. In making the citizens aware of this failure of their masters, satellite communication had a major role to play. Once satellite television began to rain down pictures of everyday life in the decadent capitalist countries, soviet citizens could not but compare what they had been told with the evidence of their own eyes. The success of the soviet educational system in striking contrast to the failure of its economic system had meanwhile produced millions of people who could think for themselves, although they lacked the courage to speak out what they thought and now satellite technology enabled even the child to proclaim that the emperor wore no clothes. It is not to be imagined that television has always and invariably been the good angel carrying the gift of freedom not has it turned out to be the universal educator that some of its pioneers had hoped it would be.