Introduction
Pakistan is a developing country faced with grave challenges to development and progress. Traditional mass media has failed to live up to its potential in combating poverty and social depravity1. Commercial television’s primary motive of catering to advertisers’ demands and attracting maximum viewership overrides any sense of purpose or attempt to broadcast meaningful and sound content. Consumerism and the gatekeeping process that is an integral part of commercial television undermine the credibility, social responsibility and civic purpose of the media2. State-owned television exists on government subsidies, which prevents it from producing independent content. It is perceived as nothing more than a mouthpiece of the government with low credibility3. Both types of media are primarily one-way and passive with no or low level of community involvement.
But profound changes are taking place in the media landscape which is opening up new possibilities and prospects for the role of television and media in general in society. Electronic mass media in the 21st century promises to be fundamentally different from 20th century media in the following ways:
(a) Declining cost of production
Advancements in media and digital technologies have reduced the costs of production and expanded the means of distribution, providing an increasing number of ways to put high quality video before the public at declining cost. They have also created the possibility for people to produce their own content and control the flow of information4.
(b) Fragmented audiences and uses and gratification approach
Blumler and Katz’s5 uses and gratification theory suggests that media users are playing an active role in choosing and using the media. Users take an active part in the communication process and are goal oriented in their media use. Today’s media user seeks out a media source that best fulfills his or her needs, as they have alternate choices to satisfy their need. This results in the fragmented nature of the audience which is becoming an increasing challenge to traditional mass media.
(c) Media convergence
Today most newly created textual, photographic, audio and video content is available in digital form. Even older content that was not “born digital” can relatively easily be converted to machine-readable formats. At the same time, the world has become more networked making it easy to transfer digital content from one person to another. The combination of technological progress in both digitization and computer networking is opening up new possibilities for the electronic media.
(d) Web altruism and Networked individualism
New technologies are increasingly participatory and networking oriented, in a phenomenon that Agree calls “networked individualism”6. These technological changes have paved the way for entirely new patterns of behavior by the users of mass media. The Internet and digital communications technologies enable people to engage more directly in social discourse, to participate in political processes and to find communities of shared interests that transcend geographic boundaries, motivations that have been fed by the explosion of participatory activity on the World-Wide Web. Some manifestations of which are blogging, podcasting, user-driven online encyclopedias (aka Wikipedia), online tutorials and open-source software offerings as well as social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. According to a study in Wired magazine, only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion7. The same concept can be applied to broadcast journalism if a mechanism is in place that allows the audience the same kind of user participation as the internet does.
Research Problem
Commercial and state-owned brand of television media is not meeting the social and development needs of a poverty-ridden country like Pakistan. The objective of this research is to propose a new model of television – Non-commercial Development Television (INDTV) which is non-commercial and whose primary motivation is to foster development and social participation.
NDTV’s aims:
- To use the possibilities and prospects opened up due to technological advancements and changing media landscape to introduce a new kind of television that is independent, non-commercial, participatory and whose primary motivation is to foster sustainable development, community activism and democratization of the media.
- To cater to the media needs of development practitioners, local communities and donor agencies.