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This study addresses itself to the problems of "cultural difference" through a semantic feature analysis of the lexicon of the hard-core poor. The hard-core poor are an internally organized, often highly resourceful, deviant subculture, the members of which do not share common societal values and do not wish for social mobility. They have their own ideology concerning the middle-class striver, considering him "sick" and his values inimical. Although other types of slum residents appear to lack integrated social systems for surviving in conditions of economic marginality, the hard-core poor do not. Their neighbors refer to them as "the self-contained society." They have developed their own adaptive institutional forms, including those for religious expression, economic survival, and social aid. This subculture has its own economic strata (not all of the hard-core group are economically poor), as well as its own elites, its own methods of communication, and highly efficient system maintenance and group insulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of the mass media, or at least the potential for widespread use of them, is one of the major factors that makes the development setting of today's poor countries radically different from that of the developed countries a century ago. This has been widely recognized and has led to attempts to integrate communications factors into general theories of development. It has resulted in what may be called positive, negative, and neutral orientations or theories, that are held implicitly and sometimes simultaneously by media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]