— at inaugural World Press Freedom Day Conference (May 3-4, 2022) at Arthur Chung Conference Centre

Presentation by Professor Vibert Cambridge
I RECOGNISE the graduate students and participants. It is a pleasure to be here today to hit the ground running. I think the bottom line is how you apply the principles of communication for development C4D, in the continuous improvement of the human condition in Guyana.

This includes the processes used in the formulation and execution of national development interventions and projects and in fostering positive social change.

At its core, contemporary communication for development practice, as applied by the international development community, is systematic. It is creative and it involves the ethical use of a society’s communication assets to promote and support the creation and sustainability of just and caring societies

It is systematic as it is based on research-based evidence. It is creative as its messages must be competitive in a highly competitive environment. It is ethical, as it should do no harm and it is expected to be a participatory process seeking to expand the participation of citizens in the very discrete phases in the application of communication for development.

These discrete phases, problem identification, the design and testing of the intervention, the implementation of the communication strategy, the monitoring of the process, the evaluation of the process and its outcome and redesign where necessary for sustainability.

In his address yesterday (Tuesday, May 3, 2022), President Ali provided a timely sketch of the rapidly changing landscape. He shared a prescriptive informed by the domestic and international realities he encounters daily as the nation’s Executive President, as the President of a newly oil-rich State with a fragile democracy.

His emphasis was on the instantaneousness of the current global communication landscape and the technologies and applications that are crucial to Guyana’s participation in the global marketplaces and in the governance of our society.

In addition to mentioning the rapidity and speed and reach of content, President Ali spoke about the landscape in need for a reaffirmation of ethics. He highlighted a cluster of issues surrounding content decency, freshness, rawness, objectivity, balance, for particular attention and context.

I consider President Ali’s high level survey of the landscape a valuable addition to my more than four decades of engagement with media practice and education in Guyana. Based on that, I offer these preliminary remarks.

First, an additional comment on the landscape. The term Fourth Industrial Revolution is used to represent our present and rapidly arriving futures. It is a landscape of convergence where things are coming together based on the cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning and things like Internet of Things. It is an environment of continuous change. There’s an environment in which the user is the central force in the communication process. It is an environment of what we call transmedia storytelling.

Hypertext is part of the grammar;; knowledge, especially the co-creation of knowledge, is expected. There are new players in this environment. There are a multiplicative non-State actors, philanthropists, new media, entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. They have been in this new environment, an expansion of what is known as collaborative commerce and in this new landscape, there is the amplification of existing inequities in the society, and, as a result, constant demand for responses to these inequities.

As a consequence of this new and emerging landscape, there is disruption. There are changes in the way organisations are structured and in the nation and in the nature of work. These are the imperatives of upskilling and reskilling. It is an environment that has had consequences for the classical formation of mass media. No longer isn’t one for men, but there are many for men, new changes, new niches, cyber communities, taste cultures, it is also an environment of which consequences include attention overload. There are so many channels that the citizen has, his attention is overloaded. This new environment has impact on our inner selves.

So as we return to the perennial conversation, about education and training for the Guyanese media worker, we need to situate you with that desired destination of a sustainable, just and caring society. In the context of now, we must ask questions, including those related to the nature and scope of the nation’s currently accessible communications infrastructure, our telephony, our Internet infrastructure, our Internet hubs. We must also ask questions about the nature of the content circulating in that globally connected infrastructure that we have in Guyana and we must ask questions about the existing state of humans of the human capital in the industry.

The Guyanese State has demonstrated a global communication network at the domestic level. The Guyanese State has demonstrated that it has the means to send government information to all 83,000 square miles of the dear land.

Although not the only media operator in Guyana, the State-owned outlets radio, newspapers, television and social media are the dominant players in Guyana’s mixed landscape. They employ more media workers than any other sector in the industry. There are other players in the industry and these include an active and increasingly diverse, privately-owned set of operations.

This includes highly integrated multimedia operations, and the news aggregation innovations by media entrepreneurs like Gordon that have been made possible by the fourth industrial revolution. So how is the Guyanese media environment performing? A response to that now.

A study of Guyanese television programming in 2017 confirmed the persistence of patterns that were evident in 2009. More than 80 per cent of the content was international. More than 60 per cent appeared to be pirated in violation of intellectual property norms and more than 50 per cent were studio-bound, talking heads.

A rapid training needs assessment of NCN in 2019, reflected three clusters of training needs, for all clusters, all categories of staff within that system, in the policy and management sector, in the content and creative sector in the technological infrastructure sector and in the environmental maintenance sector.

Conversations with the National Broadcasting Authority in 2019 suggested that those training needs were pervasive across industry in Guyana. So clearly, the current conference and the launch of the Guyana Media and Communication Academy are strategic responses to a critical national challenge, the development and maintenance of shared intentionality, the Communication Foundation and coherence required for the development of sustainable, just and caring society.

This calls for an integrated national strategy, starting with the school system and extending to the graduate level at the University of Guyana. Central to this is curriculum. The curriculum for developing our media workers in the industry must be nimble and responsive to global and domestic landscapes. It must be interdisciplinary, it must embrace international pedagogy. It must facilitate the development of competencies in research, especially the mixed method, the mixed method approach that support participation. It must provide opportunities for applying theory-based intervention, and it must nurture and develop soft skills, such as empathy, facilitation and coordination.

And at this point, we must recognise the newly-launched Master in Communication Studies at the University of Guyana. They are three specialisations: strategic communication, social change communication and visual communication. These specialisations recognise the centrality of communication for development in nation-building. Let me just remind that communication for development as a contemporary practice is the systematic, creative and ethical use of a society’s communication assets to promote and support the creation and sustainability of a just and caring society.

We have had a semester of practice to reflect on so far. The curriculum has been nimble. It has been responding to changes in the environment and in using the language of user experience research. The research outcome from this founding cohort has provided several actionable insights and that’s what C4D does. It provides actionable insights in their individual research topics. They provided a map of the communication process and practices currently available in Guyana, ranging from those practices of the individual community. So those intrapersonal issues such as the challenge of skin bleaching, marijuana decriminalisation, intimate partner violence and athletics as a strategy for social change, the group also drew upon this robust orientation or research to develop a whole of society strategy to deal with a persistent national problem that of solid waste management.

So as we articulate the national strategy, the new graduate programme through the University of Guyana’s Center for Communication Studies must be part of this mix. They must begin a conversation on integrating the world class resources, now available through the new academy into the wider education and training conversation, especially the emerging graduate programme.

I anticipate that this issue will be on the agenda of an upcoming faculty meeting at the University of Guyana. (Vibert C. Cambridge is professor emeritus, School of Media Arts and Studies, Ohio University)