Participatory film making: How development communication experiences from Nepal are being applied to rural communities in Northern Ireland

Since the 1950s, organisations and governments have been concerned with the role of communication to support development activities. Originally it was thought that the mass media could multiply the effects of extension workers, thereby enabling economically poorer countries to compress into decades the sort of development that economically richer countries had achieved over centuries. Top-down models of communication, based on the ‘bullet theory’, saw target audiences bombarded with messages of all kinds, but few development advances were made. In response, people said that development communication should be an interactive process, so ‘feedback’ as a concept was introduced into the communication chain. However, it became clear that feedback did not automatically lead to interaction, but in most cases placed the message ‘senders’ in stronger positions to manipulate their target audiences.