 Communication is quite a young science, but it has branched out in its short life. And if you are a communication student taking a general education communication course, chances are you will not be discussing the so-called sub-discourses on communication. This is what I'd like to talk about today. The title of this talk is C4D, or Communication for Development, Alternative Communication Perspectives. And my name is Alexander Flor and I'm from the UP Open University. Now, this talk would look at these so-called sub-discourses from an academic lens. I come from the UP Open University. As you know, it is the fifth campus of the University of the Philippine System. 100% of our programs and courses are offered online. And specifically, I come from the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies. But I also spent 25 years of my academic life as a professor at the UPLB College of Development Communication. And the UPLB College of Development Communication is the birthplace of development communication as an academic program. I would say that C4D, or Communication for Development, is actually based on the early work at the College of Development Communication. And the C4D discourse is based on the narrative that one can grow, one can develop through communication. As students of communication arts, we are taught that communication is for expression, right? It enables us to express our ideas and to understand the ideas of others. So it has a social function. But development communication would go beyond that, actually. Development communication content began with agricultural focus. But now, surprisingly, it encompasses economic, social, environmental, and even spiritual aspects. And I also tend to look at this from a practitioner's lens or point of view. You see, I have been involved in a number of projects since the 70s. Initially, we called C4D, or Communication for Development, as Development Support Communication, IEC, or Information Education and Communication. And then we started calling it social marketing. It was based on the idea that if one could sell soap, one could also sell socially beneficial ideas. And this evolved into what we call social mobilization, where we would mobilize communities for a specific event, for instance. We also went into environmental communication, transformational communication. Quite recently, around 15 years ago, ICT4D, or Information Communication Technologies for Development, and lately KM4D, or Knowledge Management for Development. Now, how did C4D evolve? Communication for development, how did it evolve? What you're seeing right now is actually a book that was published by the UP Open University in 2007, called Development Communication Praxis. That book contains chapters that would represent some of the thoughts behind how C4D evolved. Well, at the very beginning, communication was thought of as, you know, it is to be used for expression. And this could be traced back to the days of Aristotle with his treaties on rhetoric. And then during the Second World War, in particular, people talked about communication for persuasion as a means for propaganda. And then communication for information dissemination, communication for education, communication for development. And lastly, communication for social change. This last phrase, communication for social change, is the brief definition of development communication as forwarded by Dr. Nora Kebral, who established DEVCOM as an academic discipline. Now, I would like to talk about transformational communication. And I will be referring to this volume also published by the UP Open University in 2004, which contains a chapter on transformational communication. You see, earlier, C4D projects used a behavioral approach. We use communication for individual and social transformation. It deviated from the behavioral approach when one focuses on values, norms that determine behaviors. Then what you are doing is transformational in nature. It is not merely behavioral. Also, there is the system's view that every system, every organism, every living system has communication as its critical function. Every living thing has to perform three critical functions according to systems theorists. First is that living things or living systems exchange materials with other living systems and with its environment. They also exchange energy and they exchange information if they do not perform any of these critical functions then they expire, they die. So, the exchange of information is communication. It is nothing more than communication. So, we could say that communication is essential for any living organism to survive any system. It could be a social system to survive or it could even be an ecosystem. Now, much of this has been contained in that book, Environmental Communication. If you would like to download it, then you can just visit my web page at www.researchgate.com and it could be downloaded. I would also like to talk about so-called future states. With this, I need to refer to a science called cybernetics. Now, you would be familiar with this in the popular sense in terms of cyber cafes or cyborgs or so on. But cybernetics is actually the science of control. It comes from the Greek word kouber meaning helmsman or pilot and it was proposed by a mathematician. His name is Norbert Wiener who did a lot of research during the Second World War on guided missiles. He used many of his principles on cybernetics in this manner. It is the science of control. I would define it or I would describe it as the branch of general systems theory that deals with communication. The basic assumption of cybernetics is that there is a tendency in the entire universe. There is a tendency which is called entropy. A tendency for all things to decay. A tendency for all living systems to become disorganized. This is the reason why we grow old, why my hair would turn white, why we eventually will have wrinkles while food rots. Entropy is a natural tendency for chaos or for disorganization. The same scientist Norbert Wiener said that the only way that you can counter entropy is through the exchange of information. This tendency for all things to decay. Consider for instance that there is one organism or a system, a living system called system X and its ideal state. It has an ideal state and it is working towards that ideal state. It will deviate from this path because of entropy. By this we could deduce that communication is necessary for us to develop, to grow, to evolve. Convergence and the ideal state, as we said, information counters entropy. That's why information is also termed negentropy or negative entropy. Systems at all levels, whether these organisms, ecosystems, social systems, can reach its ideal state at the shortest amount of time by reducing entropy. How does one reduce entropy? We reduce it, we decrease it with communication. Recently there has been much talk about digital media, new media, the information age and so on and so forth. You may want to read this work which was written in 1986 called the information rich and the information poor. Two phases of the information age in a developing country. It is downloadable. There is a social promise of information and communications technology, which would bring digital natives into fore, the use of social media for instance, stopping networking synergies and so on. There is also a study on social capital and the network effect. See how networks increase the social capital. This was as early as 2004 and a paper on ICT and poverty, the Indisputable Link, written in 2005. These are found in this book Developing Societies in the Information Age, A Critical Perspective, which was published by UPOU in 2009. If you would want to have a copy you may download it at www.academia.edu. Lastly, this is a book also published by UPOU in 2002. The title is Introduction to Development Communication and it lays out the basic foundations for C4D or communication for development. The book begins with different perspectives on poverty and underdevelopment. Poverty may be caused by technological issues or the lack of economic policies, structural issues. Society is structurally compromised. Poverty is caused by poor values. It begins with this statement like many fathers, I see in the eyes of every child I meet, the eyes of my children and how poverty affects them. If you go into a field such as Development Communication, you start with children. Post-crip, the Holy Grail to Development Communication Practitioner is to design a communication strategy, procedure or technique that would make a socially beneficial message assume a life of its own, meaning to spread on its own without any fanfare, any promotion, any advertising gimmick so to speak. How can a socially beneficial idea spread like wildfire? I'd like to refer you to a science called Mimetics. The word meme is one of the more popular words in social media nowadays but what is a meme actually? The word meme was coined by a UK scientist, Dr. Richard Dawkins, in the 1970s to refer to the basic unit of culture. Now, in your course in communication, your teacher would say that the basic unit of sound would be a phoneme. The basic unit of movement is akin. The basic unit of the characteristic of a living organism is found in a gene. Now, the basic unit of culture is a meme. It's the very basic idea that would transfer from one mind to another. And according to Richard Dawkins, some memes have the nature or assume the nature of a virus. It spreads on its own. How can we make a socially beneficial idea into a meme and make it infect the entire planet? Form a critical mass. How is this done? This is what we would like to achieve in the science of development communication. So our primary ambition is really to render the field redundant. To render the field of development communication redundant. If you would like to refer or read more about these, please follow the slinks at ResearchGate. The papers are downloadable here. Also at academia.edu and linkedin.com where you would find a number of blogs regarding development communication and environmental communication as well as others. Thank you.