 I'm Felix Libreiro, Professor Emeritus of the UP Open University. I'm a simple man, therefore I'm going to talk about the simple thing, something that is largely ignored by most communication experts. I refer to what I call MDC contagion, MDC standing for mass communication, development communication, and corporate communication. You know in the Philippines, when we engage in communication practices, we normally talk about we are engaged in mass communication if we are into general communication practices. When we engage in the discussion or at least in communicating development messages, we say we are engaged in development communication, or we call our work corporate communication when we are into convincing members of our organization and the public. Now in this simple discussion, I have borrowed a terminology from medical science called contagion. You see, I look at three strategies of communication, mass communication, development communication, and corporate communication. In contagion theory, we talk about how things or how communication practices influence the behavior, the attitude, the level of knowledge of our audiences. And that these different audiences normally would look at these levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behavior as a means of converging their knowledge levels and skills into a focus on a communication purpose. Now the thing that happens here is that when we talk of contagion theory, when we talk of communication contagion, suppose we are engaged in the general practice of informing. Now let me define that first. When I refer to mass communication here, I go back to the traditional descriptor. Now so when I say mass communication, I am generally referring to informing and entertaining my audience. When I talk of development communication, I talk about informing and educating my audience whereas when I talk about corporate communication, I talk about informing and convincing members of the communication organization internally or externally. So let me now put this into some kind of a mixed form. When we engage in a communication practice, if we highlight mass communication, we should correspondingly lessen our focus on development communication or corporate communication. When we highlight development communication, then we lessen our response, our focus on development communication or corporate communication. And when we focus our attention on corporate communication, there is less emphasis on mass communication and development communication terminologies. So what's the basic difference? Well, the basic difference is really this. It's the context of our communication goal. We use the same techniques. We use the same procedures. In fact, we use the same measures of success and failure. In other words, those are the parameters. We are working on the same parameters. We are only differing in context. And that's how the mass com, dev com, corporate com, contagion works. For all our intents and purposes, therefore, the intention really is to influence the levels of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of members of our audiences. Our audience in mass communication may be general mass or in development communication specific or focused. Or in corporate communication, members of our organization or internally or members of the public who are in fact using the products of the organization. So this is how we look at it. Now in the start of this discussion, I mentioned the fact that in the practice of communication, sometimes we overemphasize our role as mass communicator or development communicator or corporate communicator. Well, that's only for us. I would imagine that's only for us as communicators. But the entire practice really is that it is based on the context of the content. Now, so if you want to, oh, by the way, before I forget, the reason why it becomes important to focus on these things is that in communication, changes happen all the time. In mass communication today, for instance, there are crossing over of concepts and practices so that more and more mass communication experts in North America are looking at the possibility of media communication taking over. So there seems to be a crossover already. In development communication, there are experts in communication, in development communication who now believe that perhaps we should not overemphasize the concept of development in the field of development communication. After all, what we do is really simply communication, period. Now, we say mass communication. We have an end goal there. We say development communication. We have a separate end goal there. We say corporate communication. We have an intention to satisfy it. But overall, when we talk of communication, this is all we do. We communicate using the same skills, using the same levels of knowledge, using, in fact, measuring our communication impact, using specific behaviors of our audiences. So that to me is the simple explanation of the concept of communication contagion. And, well, this may not be expressed as often and as conveniently in communication courses. This is what all of us communication experts should bear in mind when we do specific communication work. That, to me, is what I refer to as the MDZ contagion or the Mascom Devcom corporate communication contagion. Thank you.