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While computer commercials depict an idyllic "global village" in which digital technologies facilitate international communication and cross-cultural understanding, the impact of communication technologies in the developing world is in actuality fraught with far more complexity. Due to the economic and political realities of many developing nations, communication policy and the implementation of information technologies are rarely harnessed to the goals of grass roots empowerment, community stability, democratization, and sustainable local economic development.

The Program in Development Communication at the University of Southern California is an interdisciplinary community of scholars founded in 1995 by a group of core investigators and supplemented in 1996 by an alliance with the Pacific Institute for Women's Health. The Program's scholars are committed to the examination of communication technology's potential for--and the barriers impeding--development, defined in this case as a "widely participatory process of social change in a society, intended to bring about both social and material advancement for the majority of people through gaining control over their environment" (Rogers 1995).

The particular objectives of the Program include:

• uniting the creative efforts of scholars in the field of development communication from within and outside of USC;
  
• hosting a series of lectures to develop awareness, investigate particular issues within development communication, and facilitate exchange among the Program's network of affiliated scholars;
  
• designing and implementing a prototype for the use of communication technologies to empower grass-roots organizations in developing countries;
  
• constructing an extensive web site which would serve as an international resource and "virtual consultancy" service for grass-roots organizations, scholars and practititioners;
  
• exploring options for the development of an interdisciplinary post-graduate enrichment program in development communication which would service American students and international students working in non-governmental organizations and in independent media.
  

The Program in Development Communication has just completed its first year with a series of very successful events. The highlight of the program was a three-day symposium, Communication and Empowerment: Uses of Media and Information Technologies in Developing Countries, held on April 11-13th, 1996.

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