ABSTRACT
Experts who encouraged media development in the Third World on the basis of their knowledge of industrialized societies tended to overlook the observations and complaints of indigenous critics living within developing areas. Early media experts assumed that the various mass media entered into different sections of society, different cultures, and different groups and communities in more or less similar ways. Herman Felstehausen has proposed the concept of the communication community as the proper unit of analysis for information processes which involve the mass media. The process by which people integrate and make sense of information within communities is sometimes referred to as mutual intelligibility. The process of mutual intelligibility always occurs within and between what the ethnographer Dell Hymes calls speech communities. John Dewey and Harold Innis both accepted aspects of the transmission model of communication, but each had begun to recognize the significant diversities and differences within and among cultures and communities.
