good elderly care and childcare. In sum, we all want peace and happiness. We want
all good things.
But why do we want others to get what we don’t want? It is now proven that the
world is related and interrelated. What we don’t want may come to us inevitably by
air, water ways, and physical connections. There is a saying in Chinese that the
reverberating energy of picking aflower can be felt among the stars. That means,
we should see and foresee the relations of beings and nature in a holistic way.
Having a good attitude toward the natural environment and conserve one’s own
natural resources is what we call‘being educated’. Being uneducated, in my view,
means seeing things in fragments, aiming at exploiting other humans and nature at
an individual level or at a national level, considering only monetary profits, having
afixed mindset/worldview/beliefs, and not being able to appreciate others who are
different in cultures, social status, education, race, and ethnicity. Therefore, we
urgently need to re-educate ourselves and plan to properly educate the new gen-
erations. Development from within is needed as part of a moral ethics curriculum to
promote national pride. It should be passed on from one generation to the next.
Now it comes to communication to enable social change for the better. Good
governance, civic society, participatory communication and all cannot be achieved
without good communication, both mass and interpersonal through old and new
(social) media. Servaes (2013: 317) proposes three streams of action:first, the
media must be activated to build up advocacy for policy decisions; second, net-
working among interest groups and alliances, individuals, political forces, academic
and non-academic organizations, business, industry, religious groups etc. is needed;
public demand and movements of citizens to push development issues and agendas
are needed. Participation and power in its nature and kind are analyzed in detail in
another of Jan Servaes’ books, “Sustainability, Participation and Culture in
Communication”, published in 2013. What I would like to add here is that we are
dealing with different groups and different subcultures; therefore, intercultural
communication is needed as a pre-requisite to advocacy participatory communi-
cation. Martin and Nakayama (2004: 62) recommend the dialectical approach to
intercultural communication:first, it is important to remember that cultures change
as do individuals; second, one should view various aspects of culture in a holistic
perspective; and third, holding contradictory ideas simultaneously is part of life.
They advise to consider both group culture and individual characteristics; the
communication context; cultural relativity, the realization that culture is dynamic;
history, present and future; and understanding that all of us have some privilege and
disadvantage in one way or the other.
We need to realize that participation is not just a lip-service. Participation under
the framework of Multiplicity recognizes felt needs, environmental concerns,
self-reliance, respect for culture, and conservation of natural resources. The
self-evaluation of a community for social usefulness should be considered to
complete the circle of acting, observing/measuring, reflecting, improving, and
learning (Servaes 2013: 376).
Although development has many dimensions: socio-cultural, political, eco-
nomic, and environmental, human development should comefirst. Communication
xxii Introduction