The process can involve rapid transformations as well as resistance to change. The role of the media is crucial and ranges from promoting national identity and cohesion to galvanizing the resolve of peoples in achieving progress and development as well as meeting contemporary challenges. The downside is that the media can become the instrument of state propaganda. The media in Pakistan, in the sixty years of the country’s existence as a sovereign and independent state, rendered service in the varied aspects of national endeavour. The twenty-first century poses new challenges and opportunities in which the role of the media will be of fundamental importance.
States can be developed and built by deliberate human actions. Nations evolve almost always through a kaleidoscopic, spontaneous, multi-layered natural process, not subject to human will alone, except in some rare cases. The distinction is necessary at the outset as we proceed to examine how man-made factors such as media and others can influence the process of national as well as state development.
Factors that will impact upon national development in the 21st century include geo-political, economic, technological, social and cultural conditions of intense, rapid change as well as resistance to change. Climate change may devastate whole eco-systems so badly that nations too could be destabilized at their cores.
The physical frontiers and the communication frontiers of nation-states are likely to be in sharp contrast even as they sometimes converge. As individualized electronic linkages e.g., wireless internet over cell phones, and other choices proliferate, media and nations and citizens may assume new shared roles.
Before we speculate about the role of media in national development in the 21st century, let us recall the role of media in a similar context in previous times.
Far more than in earlier centuries, with print media and books, it was in the 20th century that modern mass media acquired a pervasive political presence. Media played a significant role in national affairs and in national development across the world regardless of the specific type of nation and state they were located in.
Nation-states may be categorized according to their levels of evolution as nations and as states and as per their levels of economic development and military power. It is not intended here to name each country in each such category but only to indicate broad categories of nation-states whose descriptive titles changed over time as a result of global political transformation.
Diaspora sub-nationalisms can be reinforced and recently immigrated communities shrunk to a ghettoization of the mind with the help of media. For instance, TV channels originating from South Asia are distributed by cable into households of South Asian origin in North America. For a significant number of families, including small children, some of the religious and cultural content of these TV channels becomes essential daily viewing. The media become comforting life-lines of “affinity-connectivity.” Yet these media also insulate their audiences from immediate reality. They prevent assimilation and integration. They promote a bizarre alienation between immediate physical neighbours. Will this pattern continue?
In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, many nations are states only in name. Only a few have stable, strong state institutions. Substantive improvements are required in institutions and there is also need to create new structures. Will media help or hinder?
The 21st century will be as much an era of building state structures and systems as it will be a period of building and boosting nations to their optimal potential.
All this while, we will need to remember that mother earth is infinite in her beauty but has limits to her capacity. The finite, non-renewable resources of the planet, be they fossil-fuels or species of fish made forever extinct by massive over-harvesting, seen in the context of global warming and climate change, will create a grim and awesome environment.
To conclude: media in the 21st century will have a full and daunting agenda. How to facilitate the building of better systems of democratic governance in rural and in urban areas. How to cope with tumultuous mega cities. How to harmonize conservation with consumption. How to help make nations cohesive and how to make states more respectful of individual citizens and of human beings even as media and their audiences move onwards into uncharted times of fascinating complexity.
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