Internal and External Dessimination of Ideas

The Basic Issue

With over six billion people now living on the earth, the dissemination of ideas has become a matter of critical importance for communities of all sizes. There was a movie out recently Six Levels of Separation, which operated on the principle that all of our 6 billion people are separated by only six layers of separation. That is, we can find any one of those six billion people in no more than six appropriate links of other people. While that may be true, getting an idea across to a grouping may take some very careful thought.

One of the factors which must be born in mind is the demographic flows of an area. For example:

• when a map is examined in relation to a geographic area, coverage areas of specific media may overlap or split a group in the middle.
• The geographic area may split from the next in terms of shopping areas, political boundaries, boundaries of government agencies, mail delivery zones, telephone exchanges and toll rates, location of bridges over rivers, mountain ranges, etc.
• Cultural and sub-cultural groupings may be a reality, stopping communication flow, which do not show up on a map. Towns may have distinct boundaries between them even though they are geographically close together.

The proliferation of magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations and cable channels has meant that whole campaigns of advertising need to be conducted in order to reach all the members of a single community , and to do so in a way that ones message registers in the awareness of the target group. The rule of thumb with mass media is "use five separate and targeted channels of communication in order to reach all members of a single group effectively.

Even within a group, there are family and sub-cultural boundaries to good communication and therefore the dissemination of ideas. Language, as the Biblical author of the story of the tower of Babel pointed out, operates as the marker of group boundaries as much as it operates as a means of communication. Even within language groups, some people cannot "hear" ideas from others even though they understand perfectly well what the person is saying. Ideas from some people are just not regarded as being of any possible value.

In the audio visual production field, particularly in the production of educational materials for the North American market, the shelf life of a production is known to average three years. Within that time, any number of barriers can come between the producer and the student ever seeing a given production:

• the video can arrive at the school a day late
• there may be a fire drill just as it is starting
• the child may be sick that day
• the school board may not purchase the item for the pool of resources
• a competing supplier may offer similar productions for lower rental

A similar list could be generated for film scenes which get left on the cutting-room floor, books which are rejected by publishers, news pieces preempted on TV and so on. The dissemination of ideas is a very complex area in any field, and Community development is no exception.

On the other side, there is an aspect of communication which is sometimes termed the "grapevine" or "moccasin telegraph". Some news travels very fast throughout the community and world. The Internet has added a new dimension to all this and has resulted in a large-scale shift in patterns of idea dissemination. As a field of study, communications is a fast growing area and information about it proliferates exponentially.

In my own area of interest, photography, (a word is .001 pictures) is a communications medium which offers endless fascination

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On-Line Resources