Module in Pop Culture

DISCLAIMER
This module is intended for STUDENTS OF TARLAC STATE

UNIVERSITY ONLY to address the flexible learning scheme for A.Y. 2020-2021
as implemented by the Commission on Higher Education brought by the COVID–
19 pandemic. The textbooks, articles, websites, and video links used in compiling
this module are properly cited. No reproduction of any part of this module may be
used, sold or distributed for commercial purposes or be changed or included in any
other business, work or publication, whether in print or electronic unless prior
permission has been granted.
Parts of the module were lifted or adapted from different sources, then were
compiled. All credits and rights are reserved to the authors or owners. No copyright
infringement intended. This is for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Republic of the Philippines
Tarlac State University
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Main Campus Tarlac City
Tel. No. (045) 493-0182; Fax. No. (045) 982-0110
General Elective 5 – Philippine Popular Culture
TSU VMGO
VISION Tarlac State University is envisioned to be a premier

university in Asia and the Pacific.
MISSION Tarlac State University commits to promote and

sustain the offering of quality & programs in higher and
advanced education ensuring equitable access to
education for people empowerment, professional
development, and global competitiveness.
Towards this end, TSU shall:
1. Provide high quality instruction trough qualified,

competent & adequately trained faculty
members & support staff.
2. Be a premier research institution by enhancing
research undertaking in the fields of technology
& sciences & strengthening collaborating
with local and international institution.
3. Be a champion in community development by
strengthening partnership with public and
private organization & individuals
CORE VALUES E - xcellence

Q - uality
U - nity
I - ntegrity
T - rust in God, Transparency & True Commitment
Y - earning for Global Competitiveness
PREPARED BY THE FOLLOWING FACULTY MEMBERS:
ERIN FAYE M. BAUN

Lecturer
efmbaun@tsu.edu.ph
ERIN FAYE M. BAUN graduated AB

Psychology at Tarlac State University as Cum
Laude. She is taking up her master’s degree in
Guidance and Counseling at Tarlac State
University. She passed the Licensure Exam for Teachers in 2018. She has been
a Lecturer of General Education Department (Social Science), College of Arts
and Social Sciences since August 2015, handled old curriculum subjects such as
General Psychology, Philippine Constitution, Principles of Economics with
Taxation and Agrarian Reform, Sociology, Socio-Anthro, Philippine History,
Ethics, Humanities, Rizal’s Life Works and Writings. She is also currently
handling new curriculum subjects such as Contemporary World, Readings in
Philippine History, Gender and Society and Life and Works of Rizal.
Ruby Rose P. Vinluan

Lecturer
rubyvinluan.tsu@gmail.com
Ruby Rose P. Vinluan is a graduate of

Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences Major in
Economics and Minor in Political Science at
University of the Philippines Baguio in 2015.
Currently, she is taking up Juris Doctor at Tarlac State University. She is also a
lecturer of General Education Department (Social Science), College of Arts and
Social Sciences of the same institution since 2015. She has been teaching
different social science subjects such as Readings in Philippine History,
Philippine Constitution, Life and Works of Rizal, Economics and Taxation,
Humanities, Sociology, Socio-Anthropology, Ethics, Contemporary World, and
Gender and Society.
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The three-unit subject provides the students with critical perspectives in
understanding and way of knowing popular culture in the Philippines. The course
gives emphasis on popular culture through the study of Cultural Studies with a
strong focus on culture industry. This subject will provide students with the
necessary tools of analysis on exploring the diverse forms of arts by utilizing the
everyday contexts of power, mode of production, representations, and subjectivity
as critical tropes. Pop Culture will be fleshed out through mixed media culture such
as visual culture, geography, cinema, music/sound, popular prints and
publications, radio and television, fashion, ads, cyberspace, experience economy
etc., and look at how these cultural products intimate the contemporary social
relations and life.
COURSE OUTLINE:
Course Content/Subject Matter

Week 1 A. Introduction: Defining Popular Culture
Week 2 B. Theories in Popular Culture
Week 3 C. Theories in Popular Culture
Week 4 D. Theories in Popular Culture
Week 5 E. Philippine Modernity and Popular Culture: An Onto-
Historical Inquiry
Week 6 F. Philippine Modernity and Popular Culture: An Onto-
Historical Inquiry
Week 7 G. Philippine Pop Culture and Experience Economy
Week 8 H. Philippine Pop Culture and Experience Economy
Week 9 I. Midterm Exam
Week 10 J. Globalization of Popular Culture
Week 11 K. Globalization of Popular Culture
Week 12 L. Local Popular Culture and Global Popular Culture
Week 13 M. Local Popular Culture and Global Popular Culture
Week 14 N. Pop Culture in the Digital Age
Week 15 O. Pop Culture in the Digital Age
Week 16 P. Commercial Culture
Week 17 Q. Commercial Culture
Week 18 R. Final Exam
One week (or S. Allotted for the Midterm and the Final Exams
an equivalent
of three
hours)
RATIONALE
Philippine Popular Culture is a 3-unit elective subject which falls within the
Arts and Humanities domain. This new elective subject focus on new forms in art,
music, and literature arising from opportunities and demands of mass audiences,
markets, and mass media and their social, economic, and political context.
Studying Philippine Popular Culture is timely during this period of pandemic since
most of us rely on technology, social and mass media to feed our mind with
information.
In line with the flexible learning for the academic year 2020-2021, this
module provides a wide discussion and developmental activities of the subject that
would give students new knowledge and help them to think critically especially in
the social, economic, and political context. The discussion was made easier to
comprehend by giving illustrations and examples for them to have a better
understanding with the different concepts of Popular Culture. The activities given
also improve the comprehension and analytical skills of the students.
INSTRUCTION TO THE USER

The students are required to study and understand the module to be able
to answer the different assessment tasks provided for each chapter. Video links
for subtopics are also provided in this module.
To the instructor of the subject, he/she is required to give a time frame for
the students to accomplish the prescribed tasks. Check the OBTL syllabus for
guidance.
ATTENTION!!!
Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the
COURSE PRE-TEST on page 85
PRE – ACTVITY on page 88
GOOD LUCK!!!
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: DEFINING POPULAR CULTURE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:
• Understand the definition of popular culture and the concepts

relating to popular culture.
• Explain the importance of popular culture.
• Assess the impacts of popular culture in our daily lives
1.1 CULTURE
Raymond Williams (1983) calls culture ‘one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language’. Williams suggests three broad
definitions. First, culture can be used to refer to ‘a general process of
intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’. We could, for example,
speak about the cultural development of Western Europe and be referring only to
intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic factors – great philosophers, great artists and
great poets. This would be a perfectly understandable formulation.
A second use of the word ‘culture’ might be to suggest ‘a particular way
of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’. Using this definition, if we
speak of the cultural development of Western Europe, we will have in mind not just
intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy,
holidays, sport, religious festivals. Finally, Williams suggests that culture can be
used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic
activity’. In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose
principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion to produce meaning.
Culture in this third definition is synonymous with what structuralists and post-
structuralists call signifying practices. Using this definition, we would probably think
of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, and fine art.
To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third
meanings of the word ‘culture’. The second meaning – culture as a particular way
of life – would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the
celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of culture. These
are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices. The third meaning – culture
as signifying practices – would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and
comics, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as texts.
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1.2 IDEOLOGY
Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular culture. Graeme Turner
(2003) calls it ‘the most important conceptual category in cultural studies.’ Like
culture, ideology has many competing meanings. An understanding of this concept
is often complicated by the fact that in much cultural analysis the concept is used
interchangeably with culture itself, and especially popular culture. The fact that
ideology has been used to refer to the same conceptual terrain as culture and
popular culture makes it an important term in any understanding of the nature of
popular culture. What follows is a brief discussion of just five of the many ways of
understanding ideology. We will consider only those meanings that have a bearing
on the study of popular culture.
First, ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a
particular group of people. For example, we could speak of ‘professional
ideology’ to refer to the ideas that inform the practices of particular professional
groups. We could also speak of the ‘ideology of the Labor Party’. Here we would
be referring to the collection of political, economic, and social ideas that inform the
aspirations and activities of the party.
A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or
concealment. Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices
present distorted images of reality. They produce what is sometimes called ‘false
consciousness’. Such distortions, it is argued, work in the interests of the powerful
against the interests of the powerless. Using this definition, we might speak of
capitalist ideology. What would be intimated by this usage would be the way in
which ideology conceals the reality of domination from those in power: the
dominant class do not see themselves as exploiters or oppressors. And, perhaps
more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals the reality of subordination
from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see themselves as
oppressed or exploited. It is argued that they are the superstructural ‘reflections’
or ‘expressions’ of the power relations of the economic base of society. We can
also use ideology in this general sense to refer to power relations outside those of
class. For instance, feminists speak of the power of patriarchal ideology, and how
it operates to conceal, mask and distort gender relations in our society.
A third definition of ideology (closely related to, and in some ways
dependent on, the second definition) uses the term to refer to ‘ideological forms.’
This usage is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts (television fiction,
pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a particular image of the
world. This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than
consensual, structured around inequality, exploitation, and oppression. Texts are
said to take sides, consciously or unconsciously, in this conflict. The German
playwright Bertolt Brecht (1978) summarizes the point: “Good or bad, a play always
includes an image of the world. . . . There is no play and no theatrical performance
which does not in some way affect the dispositions and conceptions of the
audience.”
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A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work of the
French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes (2009) argues that ideology (or
‘myth’ as Barthes himself calls it) operates mainly at the level of connotations,
the secondary, often unconscious, meanings that texts and practices carry,
or can be made to carry. For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the
operations of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact
partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly
made) as something which is natural (i.e. just existing). Similarly, it could be argued
that in British society white, masculine, heterosexual, middle class, are unmarked
in the sense that they are the ‘normal’, the ‘natural’, the ‘universal’, from which
other ways of being are an inferior variation on an original. This is made clear in
such formulations as a female pop singer, a black journalist, a working-class writer,
a gay comedian. In each instance the first term is used to qualify the second as a
deviation from the ‘universal’ categories of pop singer, journalist, writer and
comedian.
A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the 1970s and early
1980s. It is the definition of ideology developed by the French Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser. Althusser’s (2009) main contention is to see ideology not simply
as a body of ideas, but as a material practice. What he means by this is that
ideology is encountered in the practices of everyday life and not simply in certain
ideas about everyday life. Principally, what Althusser has in mind is the way in
which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the social order:
a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth, status, and
power. Using this definition, we could describe the celebration of Christmas as an
example of ideological practices.
1.3 POPULAR CULTURE

There are various ways to define popular culture. An obvious starting point
in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply
culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people. And, undoubtedly,
such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people. Such counting
would undoubtedly tell us a great deal.
Examples:
• We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs.

• We could also examine attendance records at concerts, sporting events
and festivals.
• We could also scrutinize market research figures on audience
preferences for different television programs
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A second way of defining popular culture is that it is the culture that is left
over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this
definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that
fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a
definition of popular culture as inferior
Example:
culture. What the culture/popular culture test
might include is a range of value judgements William Shakespeare is now
on a text or practice. French sociologist seen as the epitome of high
Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that cultural culture, yet as late as the 19th
distinctions of this kind are often used to century his work was very much
support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply a part of popular theatre.
ideological category: it functions as a marker
of ‘class’ (using the term in a double sense to
mean both a social economic category and the suggestion of a particular level of
quality). In other words, what started as popular cinema is now the preserve of
academics and film clubs.
Table 1.1 Popular Culture as inferior culture.
Popular Press Quality Press
Popular Cinema Art Cinema
Popular Entertainment Art
A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture’. This draws

heavily on the previous definition. The first point, those who refer to popular culture
as mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial
culture. It is mass-produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-
discriminating consumers. The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the
political right or left, depending on who is doing the analysis).
A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that
originates from ‘the people’. It takes issue with any approach that suggests that
it is something imposed on ‘the people’ from above. According to this definition,
the term should be used only to indicate an ‘authentic’ culture of ‘the people’. This
is popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for the people. One
problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the
category ‘the people’. Another problem with it is that it evades the ‘commercial’
nature of much of the resources from which popular culture is made. No matter
how much we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do not
spontaneously produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever
popular culture is, what is certain is that its raw materials are those which are
commercially provided.
4
A fifth definition of popular culture is
one that draws on the political analysis of the Hegemony - to refer to the
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly way in which dominant groups
on his development of the concept of in society, through a process of
hegemony. Those using this approach see ‘intellectual and moral
popular culture as a site of struggle between leadership’, seek to win the
the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the consent of subordinate groups
forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the in society. (Gramsci, 2009)
interests of dominant groups. Popular culture
in this usage is not the imposed culture of the
mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging
from below, spontaneously oppositional
culture of ‘the people’ – it is a terrain of The compromise equilibrium
exchange and negotiation between the two: a of hegemony can also be
terrain, as already stated, marked by employed to analyze different
resistance and incorporation. The texts and types of conflict within and
practices of popular culture move within what across popular culture
Gramsci (1971) calls a ‘compromise
equilibrium’– a balance that is mostly
weighted in the interests of the powerful. For instance, the seaside holiday began
as an aristocratic event and within a hundred years it had become an example of
popular culture. In general terms, those looking at popular culture from the
perspective of hegemony theory tend to see it as a terrain of ideological struggle
between dominant and subordinate classes, dominant and subordinate cultures.
A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking
around the debate on postmodernism. The main point to insist on here is the claim
that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction
between high and popular culture. As we shall see, for some this is a reason to
celebrate an end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture; for
others it is a reason to despair at the final victory of commerce over culture. An
example of the supposed interpenetration of commerce and culture (the
postmodern blurring of the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘commercial’
culture) can be found in the relationship between television commercials and pop
music. For example, there is a growing list of artists who have had hit records as
a result of their songs appearing in television commercials.
Finally, what all these definitions have in common is the insistence that
whatever else popular culture is, it is definitely a culture that only emerged
following industrialization and urbanization. The anxieties engendered by the new
cultural space were directly responsible for the emergence of the ‘culture and
civilization’ approach to popular culture. The argument, which underpins this
particular periodization of popular culture, is that the experience of industrialization
and urbanization changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the landscape
of popular culture.
5
KEYWORDS
Authentic Culture Culture Cultural Analysis False

Consciousness
Hegemony High Culture Ideology Ideological Forms
Mass Culture Material Practice Myth Popular Culture
Practice Professional Social Order Way of Life
Ideology
Video Corner…
What is the role popular culture plays in expressing
our values of community? Take a fresh look at the
icons that our collective consciousness brings to
the surface and the rituals that celebrate them with
this entertaining documentary filmmaker.
Why Pop Culture?: Alexandre O. Philippe at
TEDxMileHigh
REFERENCES:
Althusser, Louis (2009). ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, (Fourth Edition) edited by John
Storey, Harlow: Pearson Education.
Barthes, Roland (2009). ‘Myth today’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A
Reader, (Fourth Edition) edited by John Storey, Harlow: Pearson Education.
Bennett, Tony (1980). ‘Popular culture: a teaching object’, Screen Education, 34.
Brecht, Bertolt (1978), On Theatre, translated by John Willett, London: Methuen.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio (2009). ‘Hegemony, intellectuals, and the state’, in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edn, edited by John Storey,
Harlow: Pearson Education.
Storey, John (2015). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, An Introduction
(Seventh Edition). London.
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Turner, Graeme (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, (Third Edition).
London: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond (1983). Keywords. London: Fontana.
ATTENTION!!!
POST – ACTIVITY on page 89
PRE – ACTIVITY on page 91
GOOD LUCK!!!
7
CHAPTER 2
THEORIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
• Demonstrate critical thinking by analysis of the different theories

in popular culture.
• Define and explain the different theories and perspectives of pop
culture.
• Apply these theories in today’s context.
• Assess its implications in society’s situation.
THEORIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

➢ Culturalism
➢ Marxism
➢ Structuralism
➢ Gender and Sexuality
a) Feminism
b) Post Feminism
c) Queer Theory
➢ Post Modernism
2.1 CULTURALISM
Raymond Williams’ (1984) influence on
cultural studies has been enormous. The range of Theory of culture - the
his work alone is formidable. He has made study of relationships
significant contributions to our understanding of between elements in a
cultural theory, cultural history, television, the press, whole way of life.
radio, and advertising. The analysis of culture is the
attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these
relationships. Analysis of specific works or institutions is, in this context, analysis
of their essential kind of organization, the relationships which works, or institutions
embody as parts of the organization as a whole.
In addressing the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of
life, the purpose of cultural analysis is always to understand what a culture is
expressing: ‘the actual experience through which a culture was lived’; the
‘important common element’; ‘a particular community of experience.’ In short, it
aims to reconstitute what Williams calls ‘the structure of feeling.’ By structure of
feeling, it means the shared values of a specific group, class, or society. The term
8
is used to describe a discursive structure that is a cross between a collective
cultural unconscious and an ideology.
Culture always exists on three levels:
1. There is the lived culture of a specific time and place, only fully
accessible to those living in that time and place.
2. There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most
everyday facts: the culture of a period.
3. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period
cultures, the culture of the selective tradition.
Lived culture is culture as lived and experienced by people in their day-to-
day existence in a particular place and at a particular moment in time; the only
people who have full access to this culture are those who actually lived its structure
of feeling. Once the historical moment is gone the structure of feeling begins to
fragment. Cultural analysis has access only through the documentary record of the
culture. But the documentary record itself fragments under the processes of ‘the
selective tradition’. Between a lived culture and its reconstitution in cultural
analysis, clearly, a great deal of detail is lost. Williams advocates, as already noted,
a form of cultural analysis that is conscious that ‘the cultural tradition is not only a
selection but also an interpretation’.
Although cultural analysis cannot reverse this, it can, by returning a text or
practice to its historical moment, show other ‘historical alternatives’ to
contemporary interpretation and ‘the particular contemporary values on which its
rests’. In this way, we can make clear distinctions between ‘the whole historical
organization within which it was expressed’ and ‘the contemporary organization
within which it is used’. By working in this way, ‘real cultural processes will emerge’.
Culturalists study cultural texts and practices in order to reconstitute or reconstruct
the experiences, values, etc. – the ‘structure of feeling’ of specific groups or
classes or whole societies, in order to better understand the lives of those who
lived the culture.
2.2 MARXISM
Marxism is a difficult and contentious body As Marx (1976b)
of work. But it is also more than this: it is a body of
famously said:
revolutionary theory with the purpose of changing
the world. Marxism insists that all are ultimately ‘The philosophers have
political. The Marxist approach to culture insists only interpreted the
that texts and practices must be analyzed in world, in various ways;
relation to their historical conditions of production the point is to change it’
(and in some versions, the changing conditions of
their consumption and reception). What makes the
Marxist methodology different from other ‘historical’ approaches to culture is the
Marxist conception of history.
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Marx argues that each significant period in history is constructed around a
particular ‘mode of production’: that is, the way in which a society is organized (i.e.
slave, feudal, capitalist) to produce the material necessaries of life – food, shelter,
etc. specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life. As Marx (1976a) explains,
‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general’.
Products of Modes of Production:
(i) specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life
(ii) specific social relationships between workers and those who
control the mode of production, and
(iii) specific social institutions (including cultural ones). At the heart of
this analysis is the claim that how a society produces its means of
existence (its particular ‘mode of production’) ultimately determines
the political, social and cultural shape of that society and its possible
future development.
A classical Marxist approach to popular culture would above all else insist
that to understand and explain a text or practice it must always be situated in its
historical moment of production, analyzed in terms of the historical conditions that
produced it. There are dangers here: historical conditions are reduced to the mode
of production and the superstructure becomes a passive reflection of the base. For
example, a full analysis of nineteenth-century stage melodrama (one of the first
culture industries) would have to weave together into focus both the changes in
the mode of production that made stage melodrama’s audience a possibility and
the theatrical traditions that generated its form. The same also holds true for a full
analysis of music hall (another early culture industry). Although in neither instance
should performance be reduced to changes in the material forces of production,
what would be insisted on is that a full analysis of stage melodrama or music hall
would not be possible without reference to the changes in theatre attendance
brought about by changes in the mode of production.
Theodor Adorno (1991) and Max
Authentic culture has taken over Horkheimer (1978) coined the term
the utopian function of religion: to ‘culture industry’ to designate the
keep alive the human desire for a products and processes of mass culture.
better world beyond the confines of The products of the culture industry, they
the present. (Horkheimer 1978) claim, are marked by two features:
homogeneity, ‘film, radio and magazines
make up a system which is uniform as a
whole and in every part . . . all mass culture is identical’, and predictability. While
Malcolm Arnold (2009) and F.R Leavis (2009) had worried that popular culture
represented a threat to cultural and social authority, the Frankfurt School argue
that it produces the opposite effect: it maintains social authority. Leo Lowenthal
(1961) contends that the culture industry, by producing a culture marked by
‘standardization, stereotype, conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer
goods’, has worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its horizon to political
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and economic goals that could be realized within the oppressive and exploitative
framework of capitalist society.
The culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural homogeneity,
deprives ‘authentic’ culture of its critical function, its mode of negation.
Commodification (sometimes understood by other critics as ‘commercialization’)
devalues ‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it into yet another
saleable commodity. It carries the key to unlock the prison-house established by
the development of mass culture by the capitalist culture industry. But increasingly
the processes of the culture industry threaten the radical potential of ‘authentic’
culture.
2.3 STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived
from the theoretical work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Based on
this claim, he suggests that meaning is not the result of an essential
correspondence between signifiers and signified; it is rather the result of difference
and relationship. In other words, Saussure’s is a relational theory of language.
Meaning is produced not through a one-to-one relation to things in the world, but
by establishing difference. Structuralists argue that language organizes and
constructs our sense of reality – different languages in effect produce different
mappings of the real.
Two Divisions of Language
1. Langue refers to the system of language, the rules and conventions that
organize it. This is language as a social institution, and as Roland Barthes
(1967) points out, ‘it is essentially a collective contract which one must
accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate’.
2. Parole refers to the individual utterance, the individual use of language. To
clarify this point, Saussure compares language to the game of chess. Here
we can distinguish between the rules of the game and an actual game of
chess. Without the body of rules there could be no actual game, but it is
only in an actual game that these rules are made manifest.
Therefore, there is langue and parole, structure, and performance. It is the
homogeneity of the structure that makes the heterogeneity of the performance
possible.
Two theoretical approaches to linguistics (Saussure):
1. diachronic approach, which studies the historical development of a given
language, and
2. synchronic approach, which studies a given language in one moment in
time.
He argues that to find a science of linguistics it is necessary to adopt a
synchronic approach. Structuralists have taken the synchronic approach to the
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study of texts or practices. They argue that in order to really understand a text or
practice it is necessary to focus exclusively on its structural properties. This of
course allows critics hostile to structuralism to criticize it for it is a historical
approach to culture.
Structuralism takes two basic ideas from Saussure’s work: first, a concern
with the underlying relations of texts and practices, the ‘grammar’ that makes
meaning possible; second, the view that meaning is always the result of the
interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by the
underlying structure. In other words, texts and practices are studied as analogous
to language.
2.4 GENDER and SEXUALITY

a) FEMINISM
It is feminism that has placed gender on the academic agenda. However,
the nature of the agenda has provoked a vigorous debate within feminism itself.
There are at least four different feminisms: radical, Marxist, liberal and what Sylvia
Walby (1990) calls dual-systems theory. Each respond to women’s oppression in
a different way, positing different causes and different solutions.
Four Types of Feminisim:
1. Radical feminists argue that women’s oppression is the result of
the system of patriarchy, a system of domination in which men as a
group have power over women as a group.
2. Marxist feminist analysis the ultimate source of oppression is
capitalism. The domination of women by men is seen because of
capital’s domination over labor.
3. Liberal feminism differs from both Marxist and radical feminists in
that it does not posit a system – patriarchy or capitalism –
determining the oppression of women. Instead, it tends to see the
problem in terms of male prejudice against women, embodied in
law or expressed in the exclusion of women from specific areas of
life.
4. Dual-systems theory represents the coming together of Marxist
and radical feminist analysis in the belief that women’s oppression
is the result of a complex articulation of both patriarchy and
capitalism.
Feminism, like Marxism is always more than a body of academic texts and
practices. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally so, a political movement
concerned with women’s oppression and the ways and means to empower women
– what Bell Hooks (1989) describes as ‘finding a voice’. As Michèle Barrett (1982)
points out, ‘Cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they
involve struggles over meaning’. Lana Rakow (2009) makes much the same point,
12
‘Feminists approaching popular culture proceed from a variety of theoretical
positions that carry with them a deeper social analysis and political agenda’.
Christine Gledhill (2009) advocates a feminist cultural studies ‘which
relates commonly derided popular forms to the condition of their consumption in
the lives of sociohistorical constituted audiences’. In this respect, she observes,
‘feminist analysis of the woman’s film and soap opera is beginning to counter more
negative cine-psychoanalytic accounts of female spectatorship, suggesting
colonized, alienated or masochistic positions of identification’.
b) POST-FEMINISM
Post-feminism is a complex issue. It can be used to describe a type of
feminism, a theoretical position within feminism, and a tendency in contemporary
popular culture. Angela McRobbie (2004) is much less optimistic about the
‘success’ of feminism. What has really happened, she argues, is that much
contemporary popular culture actively undermines the feminist gains of the 1970s
and 1980s. However, this should not be understood as a straightforward ‘backlash’
against feminism. Rather its undermining of feminism works by acknowledging
feminism while at the same time suggesting that it is no longer necessary in a world
where women have the freedom to shape their own individual life courses. In post-
feminist popular culture feminism features as history: aged, uncool, and redundant.
The acknowledging of feminism, therefore, is only to demonstrate that it is no
longer relevant. In place of the feminist movement, we are given instead the
successful individual woman, embodying both the redundancy of feminism and the
necessity of individual effort. This dual action of acknowledgement and dismissal
is found in many aspects of post-feminist popular culture. McRobbie offers the
example of the advertising campaign for the Wonderbra.
McRobbie’s Wonderbra
The Wonderbra advert showing the
model Eva Herzigova looking down
admiringly at her substantial cleavage
enhanced by the lacy pyrotechnics of the
Wonderbra, was through the mid-1990s
positioned in major high street locations
in the UK on full size billboards. The
composition of the image had such a
textbook ‘sexist ad’ dimension that one
could be forgiven for supposing some
familiarity with both cultural studies and
with feminist critiques of advertising. It
was, in a sense, taking feminism into
account by showing it to be a thing of the
past, by provocatively ‘enacting sexism’
while at the same time playing with those
debates in film theory about women as
the object of the gaze and even female desire.
13
To really understand post-feminist popular culture it needs to be situated in
relation to de-traditionalization (Giddens, 1992, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002)
and to neoliberal discourses of choice and individualism (‘the market has the
answer to every problem’). The first suggests that women are now freed from
traditional feminine identities, and thus enabled to self-reflexively invent new roles,
while the second claims that the free market, with its imperative of consumer
choice, is the best mechanism to fully enable new female identity constructions.
c) QUEER THEORY
Queer theory, as Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (1995) explain,
‘provides a discipline for exploring the relationships between lesbians, gay men
and the culture which surrounds and (for the large part) continues to seek to
exclude us. Moreover, ‘by shifting the focus away from the question of what it
means to be lesbian or gay within the culture, and onto the various performances
of heterosexuality created by the culture, Queer Theory seeks to locate Queerness
in places that had previously been thought of as strictly for the straights’. Indeed,
part of the project of Queer is to attack the very “naturalness” of gender and, by
extension, the fictions supporting compulsory heterosexuality.
To discuss the supposed naturalness of gender and the ideological fictions
supporting compulsory heterosexuality, Judith Butler’s (1999) very influential book
Gender Trouble is used. Butler begins from Simone de Beauvoir’s (1984)
observation that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’. De
Beauvoir’s distinction establishes an analytical difference between biological sex
(‘nature’) and gender (‘culture’), suggesting that while biological sex is stable, there
will always be different and competing (historically and socially variable) ‘versions’
of femininity and masculinity.
Although de Beauvoir’s argument has the advantage of seeing gender as
something made in culture – ‘the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes’
(Butler, 1999) – and not something fixed by nature, the problem with this model of
sex/gender, according to Butler, is that it works with the assumption that there are
only two biological sexes (‘male’ and ‘female’), which are determined by nature,
and which in turn generate and guarantee the binary gender system. Against this
position, she argues that biology is itself always already culturally gendered as
‘male’ and ‘female’, and, as such, already guarantees a version of the feminine
and the masculine. Therefore, the distinction between sex and gender is not a
distinction between nature and culture: ‘the category of “sex” is itself a gendered
category, fully politically invested, naturalized but not natural’. In other words, there
is not a biological ‘truth’ at the heart of gender; sex and gender are both cultural
categories.
14
Furthermore, it is not just that ‘gender
“One is not born a woman, one is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
becomes one; but further, one also the discursive/cultural means by which
is not born female, one sexed nature or a natural sex’ is produced
becomes female; but even and established as “pre-discursive”, prior to
more radically, one can if one culture, a politically neutral surface on which
chooses, become neither culture acts. In this way, the internal stability
female nor male, woman nor and binary frame for sex is Butler explains,
man”. ‘there is no reason to divide up human bodies
into male and female sexes except that such
a division suits the economic needs of
heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality’.
2.5 POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism is a term current inside and outside the academic study of
popular culture. It has entered discourses as different as pop music journalism and
Marxist debates on the cultural conditions of late or multinational capitalism. As
Angela McRobbie (1994) observes, Postmodernism has entered into a more
diverse number of vocabularies more quickly than most other intellectual
categories. It has spread outwards from the realms of art history into political theory
and onto the pages of youth culture magazines, record sleeves, and the fashion
pages of Vogue. This seems to me to indicate something more than the mere
vagaries of taste. She claims that postmodernism has enfranchised a new body of
intellectuals: ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically
drowned out by the (modernist) metanarratives of mastery, which were in turn both
patriarchal and imperialist’.
Postmodernism is a culture, which Affirmative culture invents a
offers no position of ‘critical distance’; it is a new reality: ‘a realm of apparent
culture in which claims of ‘incorporation’ or unity and apparent freedom
‘co-optation’ make no sense, as there is no was constructed within culture
longer a critical space from which to be in which the antagonistic
incorporated or co-opted. The thorough relations of existence were
‘culturalization’ or ‘aestheticization’ of supposed to be stabilized and
everyday life is what marks postmodernism pacified. Culture affirms and
off from previous socio-cultural moments. conceals the new conditions of
Affirmative culture is a realm we may enter social life’.
in order to be refreshed and renewed in
order to be able to continue with the ordinary affairs of everyday life. The promises
made with the emergence of capitalism out of feudalism, of a society to be based
on equality, justice, and progress, were increasingly relegated from the world of
the everyday to the realm of ‘affirmative’ culture.
A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any
number of different cultural texts and practices: for example, television, music
video, advertising, film, pop music, fashion, new media, romantic love.
15
KEYWORDS
Aestheticization Commodification/ Culturalism Culturalization

Commercialization
Culture Industry Diachronic Approach Feminism Gender
Langue Feminism Lived Culture Marxism
Parole Post Feminism Post Modernism Queer Theory
Recorded Culture Selective Tradition Sexuality Structuralism
Structure of Feeling Synchronic
Approach
REFERENCES:
Adorno, Theodor (1991). ‘The schema of mass culture’, in The Culture Industry.
London: Routledge.
Arnold, Matthew (2009). ‘Culture and Anarchy’, in Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture: A Reader, (Fourth Edition), edited by John Storey. Harlow: Pearson
Education.
Barrett, Michèle (1982). ‘Feminism and the definition of cultural politics’, in
Feminism, Culture and Politics, edited by Rosalind Brunt and Caroline
Rowan. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Barthes, Roland (1967). Elements of Semiology. London: Jonathan Cape.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1984). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage.
Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck Gernsheim (2002). Individualization. London:
Sage.
Burston, Paul and Colin Richardson (1995). ‘Introduction’, in A Queer Romance:
Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, edited by Paul Burston and Colin
Richardson. London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
10th anniversary Edition. New York: Routledge.
Giddens, Anthony (1992). The Transformation of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity.
Gledhill, Christine (2009). ‘Pleasurable negotiations’, in Cultural Theory and
Popular Culture: A Reader, (Fourth Edition), edited by John Storey. Harlow:
Pearson Education.
Hooks, Bell (1989). Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. London:
Sheba Feminist Publishers.
Horkheimer, Max (1978). ‘Art and mass culture’, in Literary Taste, Culture and
Mass Communication, Volume XII, edited by Peter Davison, Rolf Meyersohn
and Edward Shils. Cambridge: Chadwyck Healey.
16
Leavis, F.R. (2009). ‘Mass civilisation and minority culture’, in Cultural Theory and
Popular Culture: A Reader, (Fourth Edition), edited by John Storey. Harlow:
Pearson Education.
Lowenthal, Leo (1961). Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Palo Alto, CA:
Pacific Books.
Marx, Karl (1976a). ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction’, in Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Marx, Karl (1976b). ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy, by Frederick Engels. Peking: Foreign
Languages Press.
McRobbie, Angela (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London:
Routledge.
McRobbie, Angela (2004). ‘PostFeminism and Popular Culture’, in Feminist Media
Studies, 4 (3), 255–64.
Rakow, Lana F. (2009). ‘Feminist approaches to popular culture: giving patriarchy
its due’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, (Fourth Edition),
edited by John Storey. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Storey, John (2015). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, An Introduction
(Seventh Edition). London.
Walby, Sylvia (1990). Theorising Patriarchy, Oxford: Blackwell.
Williams, Raymond (1981). Culture. London: Fontana.
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
17
CHAPTER 3
PHILIPPINE MODERNITY AND POPULAR CULTURE: AN ONTO-
HISTORICAL INQUIRY
• Explain the brief history of Pop Culture in the Philippines.

• Determine and evaluate the significant events that influence the
development of Pop Culture.
"Building a culture has to start with a foundation, and that foundation must
necessarily be the culture of the Filipino people if this could be separated
with the encrustations grown on it by colonial rule."
3.1 History of Popular Culture in the Philippines

Popular culture, according to National Artist for literature Bienvenido
Lumbera in his book Revaluation: Essays on Philippine Literature, Theatre and
Popular Culture (1984, as cited in Garchitorena, n.d.), is highly different from the
folk culture and nationalist culture of the Filipinos. In a nutshell, folk culture is the
way of living in a place in a specific time and portrays the practices of a certain
people, and on how they cope to survive with nature. Nationalist culture is the
culture created through colonial resistance with the collective of a people on a
given place and time. These two are different from popular culture which can be
traced even in the period of Hispanization of the Philippines.
According to Lumbera, popular culture in the Philippines was created and
used by the Spaniards to the native Filipinos or Indios via plays and literature to
get the heart of the natives and win it. The colonial origins of popular culture found
in the Philippines can be traced by looking at salient developments in Philippine
literature. The first permanent Spanish settlement began replacing the native
culture with a Christian and European tradition. The children of the native elite
under the tutelage of missionaries became a core group of intelligentsia called
'ladinos', as they became instrumental "in bringing into the vernacular, literary
forms that were to be vehicles for the "pacification" of the natives".
18
Popular culture as introduced Forms of popular theatre and literature
by the Spanish was "popular" to the such as "the pasyon, sinakulo, and
extent that it was a "watering-down of korido ensured the acceptance and
Spanish-European culture for the spread of Christianity, and the komedya
purpose of winning the general and awit did the same for the
populace over to the 'ideology' of the monarchy."
colonial regime." Popular culture at
the time was created by colonial
authorities, with the aid of the local intelligentsia, to promote the interests of the
Church and the State.
However, once the native
intelligentsia saw the effects of Example:
popular culture and knew how to The work of Marcelo H. del Pilar when
work its way as propaganda, they he used prayers such as the 'Aba,
soon used the Spanish weapon Ginoong Maria' and 'Ama Namin' in a
against them. In the 19th century, sort of parody to strike against the
through the Propaganda Movement, abusive Spanish Friars.
the native intelligentsia used the
same forms of popular culture to
"undermine the power of the abusive friars and rally the populace to put an end to
colonial rule".
The advent of American colonialism brought, the properly so-called,
popular culture to the Philippines. The liberal policy regarding the printing press,
soon through radio, television and film, increased the circulation of popular culture
forms. Not only through these forms but also in new media then, such as films.
Hollywood films had a near-monopoly in the Philippine market especially in the
absence of European movies due to World War I.
Early on, the local intelligentsia has the same apprehensions over mass
media as they called it commercialization, or vulgarization of art. According to
Lumbera, the local intelligentsia noticed that "Popular literature as a commodity
intended for a mass market was seen to pose a threat to serious artistic work,
because the writers accommodated his art to the demands of the publishers and
editors who were more interested in sales rather than aesthetics." More so,
"...popular culture is not created by the populace... rather, it is culture created either
by the ruling elite or by members of the intelligentsia in the employ of that elite, for
the consumption of the populace."; it is "'packaged' entertainment or art intended
for the profit of rulers, be they colonial administrators or native bureaucrats and
businessmen."
To see it in Lumbera's lens, "Popular culture is power, and whoever wields
it to manipulate minds is likely to find its literary and technological machinery turned
against him when the minds it has manipulated discover its potency as a political
weapon."
19
READING ACTIVITY!!!
Read the following articles:
History and Cultural Identity by Rolando Gripaldo (refer to page 51)
Philippine Popular Culture: Dimensions and Directions. The State of
Research in Philippine Popular Culture by Doreen Fernandez (refer to page
58)
3.2 SUMMARY
1. Definition. A stable definition of "popular culture" in the Philippine context must

be reached. More than the choice of topics that can be included under popular
culture study, this also involves defining boundaries or overlaps with respect to
other relatively established fields of inquiry (for example, mass communications,
drama, literature) in terms of theory, methods, and concerns.
2. Review of Literature. There is a need for critical review and integration of all the
related literature, to define the problems of and possibilities for future research.
3. Identification of Issues. Since popular culture in the Philippines was brought

about mainly by the entry from the United States of mass media into a culture
already heavily American in orientation because of the colonial experience,
discussion of popular culture should consider the following and related issues:
a) Commodified culture and consumerism, exemplified in the

generation of false needs through advertisements and the exposure to an
alien lifestyle through forms of popular culture;
b) Westernized taste and consciousness, or cultural imperialism

and cultural satellization, through imported films, television shows,
publications, and popular songs;
c) The mystification of Philippine social realities and the pacification

of any feelings against current reality by means of the legitimization of
economic and political structures not only through the content of TV, radio,
film, and comics stories, but also through slogans, government advertising,
programming, and the like.
4. Identification of the "public. " The audience, the populus, that makes culture
popular rather than elite should be identified in the concrete Philippine context.
What is the popular writer's concept of his public? How is his, or the industry's idea
of what "sells" formulated? Is there a feedback mechanism?
20
5. Definition of the popular writer. Considering the size of his audience, the popular
writer is definitely a significant intellectual. Since the Pilipino writer generally writes
for the popular magazines, is he then also a "serious" writer? How is the popular
writer then linked to the literary tradition? To what socioeconomic status does he
belong, and how is this differentiated from that of his audience? From that of other
writers? Does this have bearing on the "popularity" of his work?
6. Identification of purpose. "Popular culture is power," and since it is not created

by the people who "consume" it, who does, and to what purpose? Is it for profit?
or for development? or in manipulation?
7. Deepening of inquiry into fields already explored. The preceding survey has
shown that much of the work done to date on popular culture has been survey
work: the history of the field, its current state, its significance in Philippine life,
perhaps an evaluation. In these fields - film, radio, television, comics, magazines,
- it is now necessary to start narrow-field, in-depth studies. An underlying aesthetic
may be determined; the link to tradition; the Filipino quality in the form or an aspect
of it; how it functions as a cultural indicator.
8. Identification of other fields of inquiry. A few other fields not mentioned here
have already been explored by one or two individuals: popular arts, namely the
ceramic and crocheted objects that the low-budget housewife buys with which to
decorate her home; popular languages, like swardspeak, Taglish, the young slang;
popular religiosity, (e.g. the Sto. Niño, the icons hanging in jeepneys, the rites and
rituals in Quiapo); food habits; disco culture. But how about the language of
gesture, popular architectural taste, sports, graffiti, and that tremendously rich
expanse, the pop icon? What Filipino pop icons are there besides the jeepney, and
what effect do they have on the community's understanding of itself?
Popular culture as a form of discourse serves as a potent force for

persuasion and value-building and for the perception of consciousness. In the
Philippines today, as we have seen, it is largely available to the urban population
in Metro Manila, the primate city, and in the urban centers of education, planning
and work, In the rural areas, ethnic culture dominates among the tribal groups; folk
culture among the rest. The latter, however, because of rural electrification and the
transistor radio, are starting to be touched as well by popular culture. In the small,
Third World, developing nation that is the Philippines, in which the majority are the
poor, the mass, the populus, popular culture is indeed power, and therefore
demands systematic and purposeful attention.
21
KEYWORDS
Artifacts Civilization Cultural Citizenship Cultural

Identity
Damaged Culture Film Folk Culture High Culture
Hollywood Komiks Literature Low Culture
Mentifacts Nationalist Popular Magazine Popular Music
Culture
Propaganda Radio Spanish-European Socifacts
Movement Culture
Symbolate Vulgarization
REFERENCES:
Fernandez, Doreen (2008). Philippine Popular Culture: Dimensions and
Directions. The State of Research in Philippine Popular Culture. Philippine
Studies vol. 29, no. 1 (1981) 26–44.
Garchitorena, Aj (n.d). Pop Culture and the Rise of Social Media in the Philippines:
An Overview. Retrieved from <
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/ronda2014/Culture-Philippines.pdf>
Gripaldo, Rolando (2010,2015). History and Cultural Identity. De La Salle

University, Manila. Retrieved from
<https://www.academia.edu/10341582/History_and_Cultural_Identity_2010
_2015_>
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
22
CHAPTER 4
PHILIPPINE POP CULTURE AND EXPERIENCE ECONOMY
• Demonstrate a better understanding on the Philippine Pop Culture

and Experience Economy.
• Apply these concepts in Philippines context.
• Assess its implications in society’s situation.
Economic development normally carries with its cultural development.

Economic and scientific advancement transforms the culture of the nation. The
First Wave civilization has the agricultural feudal culture; the Second Wave
civilization has the industrial modern culture, while the Third Wave civilization has
the postindustrial postmodern culture. The Philippines right now is basically a First
Wave (agricultural) country that experiences elements of a Third Wave civilization.
That is why it appears logical for this country to shift or “pole-vault” from the First
Wave to the Third Wave civilization.
Figure 4.1 Economic Societies.
23
4.1 Experience as Product
Increasing competition in the market means that “goods and services are
no longer enough” and that producers must differentiate their products by
transforming them into “experiences” which engage the consumer. An experience
can be considered a product since it must be produced or staged to be made
available. Experiences represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of
economic output that have the potential to distinguish business offerings. Elements
that make up an experience including those elements that render an experience
meaningful.
Table 4.1 Elements of Experience.
4.2 Experience Sector
Experiences are even more immaterial and intangible than services since
the users must be more engaged than in services because the experience takes
place in their minds, being the customer a co-producer. The aim of services is to
solve the customers’ problems, the experience industry seeks to give the
customers what can be defined as a mental journey (people may experience the
same performance in different ways).
Pine and Gilmore (1999) take “the experience” beyond the provision of
goods and services to the recognition of experience as a distinct economic
offering. As an economic offering, experiences can add value to a business’s
goods and services and are distinct from both. Economic actors gain an
advantage in the market by staging and selling memorable experiences that are
enjoyable and personally engaging the customer.
The customer who buys a service buys a set of intangible activities carried
out on his/her behalf. The purchase of an experience, on the other hand, buys time
enjoying a series of memorable events that engage the consumer in a personal
24
way. Examples of experience are sport, art, and culture (the theatre, film, music,
TV, etc.), museums, tourism, gastronomy, design and architecture, computer
games, entertainment on mobile phones, and advertising.
4.3 EXPERIENCE ECONOMY
Experience economy is a notion that intends to conceptualize a new trend

in economic development, in which the driver is people’s search for identity and
involvement in an increasingly rich society. In this context, the experience
economy does not refer to a particular industry or a specific segment of the
economy since the experience component of a product or service is increasingly
becoming the basis for profit and because an experience component in theory can
be added to all products and services. The experience economy can be conceived
as the next step in the development of new economically dynamic sectors.
Economy and society had developed “from the ancient agrarian economy, to the
industrial economy, to the latter service economy and that the current economy is
shifting to the experience economy”.
The “cultural sector” is non-reproducible and aimed at being consumed on

the spot (a concert, an art fair, an exhibition) and mass-dissemination and export
(a book, a film, a sound recording). The “creative sector” may also enter into the
production process of other economic sectors and become a “creative” input in the
production of non-cultural goods.
Bille and Lorenzen (2008) reached a tentative demarcation of the

experience economy by defining 3 areas:
1. Creative experience areas (areas that have experience as the

primary goal and where artistic creativity is essential to its production). For
example, theatre, music, visual arts, literature, film, computer games.
2. Experience areas (areas that have experience as the primary

goal, but where artistic creativity is not essential). For example, museums,
libraries, cultural heritage sites, natural and green areas, restaurants, the
pornography industry, spectator sports.
3. Creative areas (areas where artistic creativity is essential but

which do not have experience as a primary goal: they are not intended
directly for the consumer market but instead provide services to business
(B2B), which are built into or around mixed products). For example, design,
architecture, advertising.
Much of the experience economy is composed of mixed products that

combine experience and functionality and of companies that attempt, through the
25
use of experience design, experience marketing, events, storytelling and branding,
to invest their products and services with a range of experiences, histories and
values which can differentiate them from those of their competitors. The question
of how art and culture is to be defined is an issue that has been under debate for
centuries. The discussion will not be continued here, but it is enough to state that
obvious parallels may be drawn between the discussion of the definition of art and
culture, and to the discussion of the definition of experiences and the experience
economy. Where culture can be defined as either art, cultural areas or as an
aspect, experience can be defined as good (subjective) experiences, as
experience areas or as a "mega trend".
Table 4.2 Definitions of art and culture versus experiences
Culture Experiences
Quality Culture as Arts The good experience

evaluation
Quality evaluated by: Quality evaluated by:
Primarily professionals (peer The consumer

review)
Subjective
Partially objective
Sector Cultural areas Experience areas
Societal trend Aspect Megatrend

Linked to the market,
Linked to societal values and consumption,
norms and commercial exploitation
From the merger between culture and business, a new kind of economy is
growing. An economy that is based on an increasing demand for experiences and
that builds upon the added value that creativity lends to both new and traditional
products and services (Danish government report, 2003). At the same time, it
expresses a general expectation that the experience economy will grow: that the
culture and experience economy has come into focus, both at home and abroad,
correlates closely with the fact that it is a field that is increasingly expanding within
the economy. (Government, 2003).
26
KEYWORDS
Communication Competition Creative Area Creative

Experience
Cultural Cultural Area Economic Education
Development Development
Experience Experience Area Experience Experience
Economy Sector
REFERENCES:
Bill, Trine (2010). The Nordic approach to the Experience Economy – does it
make sense?. Copenhagen Business School. Retrieved from
<https://research.cbs.dk/files/58952160/44_TB_The_Nordic_Approach_to_
Experience_Economy_Does_it_make_Sense_Final.pdf>
Pine, B.J. and J.H. Gilmore (1999). The Experience Economy – Work is Theatre
& Every Business a Stage, Harvard Business School Press, Boston Mass.
Ramos, Luis Moura (n.d.). The Experience Economy and Local Development.
University of Coimbra. Retrieved from <http://www.creative-
heritage.eu/creative-
heritage.eu/Luis_Moura_Ramos_The_experience_economy_and_local_de
velopmentf38e.pdf?eID=tx_nawsecuredl&u=0&file=uploads/secure/mit_do
wnload/Luis_Moura_Ramos_The_experience_economy_and_local_develo
pment.pdf&t=1438425615&hash=89b76a07c7ebf1feee68f381b6d634eb>
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
27
CHAPTER 5
Globalization of Popular Culture
• Briefly explain the effects of globalization to pop culture and vice

versa.
• Analyze the cultural impacts of globalization.
5.1 GLOBALIZATION
The phenomenon of globalization is defined as the "acceleration and

intensification of economic interaction among the people, companies, and
governments of different nations" (Globalizarion101.org). Most studies of
globalization tend to focus on changes occurring in the economic and political
spheres. The details of those issues, such as tariff rates and international
agreements, have fallen within the traditional province of government bureaucrats
and political leaders. However, the dramatic changes brought by globalization
have forced policymakers to respond to public pressures in many new areas.
Observers of globalization are increasingly recognizing that globalization is having
a significant impact on matters such as local cultures, matters which are less
tangible and hard to quantify, but often fraught with intense emotion and
controversy. Generally speaking, issues surrounding culture and globalization
have received less attention than the debates, which have arisen over globalization
and the environment or labor standards. In part this is because cultural issues are
more subtle and sensitive, and often more confusing.
Globalization, propelled by advance in communication and transportation

technology, the integration of global markets, and privatization and deregulation of
media outlets in much of the world, has intensified the role of media and popular
culture in shaping or communication and understanding of cultures different from
our own. While TV programs, celebrities, and music videos are often perceived
simply innocent and fun entertainment, these and other forms of popular culture
are powerful transmitters of cultural norms, values, and expectations. While the
United States continues to dominate production and dissemination of popular
culture globally, numerous media circuits today originate from India, Latin America,
Nigeria and China; thus, central dynamic of intercultural communications is how
global media and distribution of popular culture alternately promote strong desires
28
for inclusion in global culture and also mobilize intense resistance to cultural
imperialism.
Media and popular culture serve as primary channels through which we

learn about groups who are different from ourselves and make sense of who we
are. Just as limited and negative representations produced through media and pop
culture promote and reinforce stereotypes impacting perceptions of others and
ourselves, diasporic and migrant communities reconnect and remember home
through popular culture as they resist full assimilation and otherness.
Through diverse processes, our globalized world is tremendously

interconnected and interdependent (Tomlinson, 2007), characterized by
increasingly liquid and multidirectional flows of people, objects, places, and
information (Ritzer, 2010). This results in interesting cultural configurations such
as “Chocolate City” in Guangzhou, China, where many African businessmen
reside (Bodomo, 2010), and China Town in Lagos, Nigeria. About 74 million (nearly
half) of the migrants from developing countries reside in other developing countries
(Ratha & Shaw, 2010) which contradicts the popular belief that everyone is
migrating to the West. The tendency to place Americanization and Westernization
at the epicenter of every discussion of globalization reinforces the cultural
imperialism that many scholars decry. While its influence is undeniable, “the United
States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node
in a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (Appadurai,
1996). The study of popular culture and intercultural communication on the global
scale must attend to the multiplicity of cultural linkages that exist in a networked
society.
Globalization contradicts the very idea that culture is bound to specific

regions (Goodman, 2007). It also challenges the idea of culture as a unified set of
norms. How can one possibly identify the values and customs of more than 7 billion
people? However, an analysis of global culture does not require the identification
of homogeneity, shared values, or social integration; rather, it requires the
identification of a set of practices that constitute a cultural field within which
struggle, and contestation occur. Alternatively, if we view culture as shifting
tensions between the shared and the unshared (Collier, Hegde, Lee, Nakayama,
& Yep, 2002), we uncover dynamics such as the interplay between integration and
fragmentation that characterize global relations. Likewise, the fragmented space
of pop culture nation (i.e., global popular culture) can be understood as perpetually
unfolding tensions and struggles that occur when multiple cultural systems and
artifacts flow into and away from one another. Popular culture is a resource in
identity construction and consequently enables and constrains intercultural
communication. It also disrupts cultural identities leading to resistance and forges
hybrid transnational cultural identities.
29
5.2 INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
Popular culture functions as a resource in shared meaning making.

However, popular culture can constrain intercultural communication and
understanding as much as it enables them. When we take popular culture to be
reality rather than representation, the result is an “illusion of knowing.” Much of
what “we think we know” about people, places, and ideas is obtained and
confirmed by popular culture. Invariably, this finds its way into our evaluations of
others and communicative choices. Encounters with others through the mass-
mediated space of popular culture are helpful but not a substitute for genuine
conversations, relationship building, and self- reflexivity about our positionality.
5.3 HYBRID TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES: CONVERGE OR DIVERGE
Cultural identity transcends continental, national, and regional boundaries.

In the context of globalization, it is a colorful tapestry of transnational experiences
and interactions. However, in the past decade, there has been a resurgence of
national pride and identification. The hybridization of popular culture holds many
possibilities for achieving shared meaning on the global scale and provides a
sense of comfort that all is not lost. In this sense, hybridization can be interpreted
not as a sullying of cultural purity but as a form of resistance against complete
domination (Hegde, 2002). Popular culture always reflects the interests of its
producer and, as such, should not be romanticized but scrutinized.
Considering intercultural communication in the global context sensitizes us

to the complex systems of meaning that impact our communication daily. In the
fragmented space of global popular culture, our identities are shaped and
reshaped as we communicate across difference and make decisions to resist and
comply, diverge, and converge. Culture industries are making an attempt to
acknowledge a wider range of human experience, and diversity is the buzzword of
the century. It is rather like keeping a minority friend around to prove that you aren’t
racist. Is the move toward diversity and multiculturalism producing more openness
and compassion, or are we hiding behind it? Have we conflated the consumption
of certain types of popular culture with progressiveness? Do we automatically think
of Lady Gaga fans as more open-minded? Would your “openness” to another
person change if he or she watched only ABS-CBN or GMA? Popular culture is
now an undeniable part of our everyday meaning making and being savvy about
the conclusions we draw from it is a crucial part of intercultural competence in the
global context.
30
READING ACTIVITY!!!
Read the following article:
K-FASHION AND TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN GLOBALIZATION IN THE
PHILIPPINE SETTING by Carlo Jejomar Pascual Palad Sanchez (page 66)
KEYWORDS
Companies Converge Cultural Imperialism Diverge
Entertainment Globalization Global Culture Hybridization
ICT Interaction Interconnected Intercultural
Communication
Interdependent Integrated Internet K fashion
K pop Media Nation Technology
Video Corner…
This video lecture discusses the cultural dimensions of

globalization from a sociological perspective.
Globalization and culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ydX2FY0dvY
Why does Globalization of Popular Culture cause

problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuFWWgK15Fw
31
REFERENCES:
Culture and Globalization, 2017. LEVIN Institute. Pages 2-8. Retrieved from
<http://www.globalization101.org>
Globalization and Popular Culture, 2015. Sage Publications. Pages 219-224.
Retrieved from < https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-
assets/66098_book_item_66098.pdf>
Sanchez, Carlo Jejomar. (2016). K-FASHION AND TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN
GLOBALIZATION IN THE PHILIPPINE SETTING. Ateneo De Manila
University. Retrieved from <
https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/aiks/article/download/2733/2606
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
32
CHAPTER 6
Local Popular Culture and Global Popular Culture
• Describe and compare local to global culture.

• Differentiate the impact of each in Philippines and other
countries.
The globalization of the production and distribution of goods and services

is a welcome development for many people in that it offers them access to products
that they would not otherwise have. However, some are concerned that the
changes brought about by globalization threaten the viability of locally made
products and the people who produce them. For example, the new availability of
foreign foods in a market—often at cheaper prices—can displace local farmers
who have traditionally earned a living by working their small plots of family-owned
land and selling their goods locally.
Globalization, of course, does more than simply increase the availability of

foreign-made consumer products and disrupt traditional producers. It is also
increasing international trade in cultural products and services, such as movies,
music, and publications. The expansion of trade in cultural products is increasing
the exposure of all societies to foreign cultures. And the exposure to foreign
cultural goods frequently brings about changes in local cultures, values, and
traditions. Although there is no consensus on the consequences of globalization
on national cultures, many people believe that a people's exposure to foreign
culture can undermine their own cultural identity.
6.1 THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURES
Although the United States may play a dominant role within the
phenomenon of cultural globalization, it is important to keep in mind that this is not
an entirely one-way street. Many other countries also contribute to global culture,
including American culture itself. Just as American popular culture influences
foreign countries, other national cultures are influential within the United States
and also increase their presence worldwide.
33
Hollywood is a good example of an industry that integrates elements from
more than one culture. Most people would think of Hollywood as something entirely
American. However, while Hollywood dominates world cinema, American movies
are subject to foreign influence. According to The Economist, "one reason for
Hollywood's success is that from the earliest days it was open to foreign talent and
foreign money."
Many American movies are remakes of foreign films. For example, the
2007 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, “The Departed”, is a remake of the
Chinese film, “Infernal Affairs.” There has also been a recent explosion of
American remakes of European films. A perfect example is “The Tourist” (originally
the French film, “Anthony Zimmer”) which raked in $287 million at the box office.
In 2011 the Millennium Trilogy, a Swedish series, was adapted to film in "The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo" which opened to critical acclaim and grossed over $230
million at the box office (Box Office Mojo, 2011). Also, many film-making
companies, producers, and actors in Hollywood are not inherently American. The
Columbia Tristar and Twentieth Century Fox companies are owned by Japan's
Sony and Australia's News Corporation, respectively, two foreign media
conglomerates. James Cameron, producer of the movie Titanic, is Canadian.
Moreover, many of Hollywood's most famous actors are not Americans. Arnold
Schwarzenegger is from Austria, and Nicole Kidman grew up in Australia. From
this perspective, it can be argued Hollywood is a multicultural institution.
However, it is also true that actors such as Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson,
upon arriving in Hollywood, were given language lessons to help them lose their
foreign accents. Hollywood producers ask actors to Americanize their accents
largely over sensitivities that American audiences might perceive actors negatively
if they appeared to be foreign. So, while Hollywood may incorporate many foreign
elements into its craft—especially behind the scenes—its public face is distinctly
American.
6.2 REAFFIRMATION OF LOCAL CULTURE
Despite these homogenizing effects, some people would argue that

globalization can also reinforce local cultures. In India, for example, satellite TV
permits an increase in the number of regional channels, many of which can and
do telecast Indian content. This gives an Indian individual new opportunity to
identify with his regional ties. Similarly, global companies have to take into account
the culture of all the countries where they conduct operations or sell products. This
can also enhance cultural awareness.
34
Many observers have speculated that the homogenizing effect of
globalization on national cultures in fact tends to produce a reaction among
indigenous peoples, which leads those whose cultures are threatened to want to
reaffirm their own local traditions. Author Benjamin Barber, in particular, has made
the case that the sometimes-violent reactions against the West by elements within
Islamic society may be seen in this light. Barber argues that these rebellious
movements may be seen as negative manifestations of a broader desire to reaffirm
their traditional values, against the disruptive onslaught of Western beliefs. For
example, capitalism favors a more fast-paced environment and a consumer
culture, which differ from the lifestyle that people in some countries are used to.
This is particularly hard to accept for people who are afraid of change and want to
preserve their traditions.
The popular culture of the majority has always been a concern of powerful
minorities. Those with political power have always thought it necessary to police
the culture of those without political power, reading it symptomatically for signs of
political unrest, reshaping it continually through patronage and direct intervention.
In the 19th century, however, there is a fundamental change in this relationship.
Those with power lose, for a crucial period, the means to control the culture of the
subordinate classes. When they begin to recover control, it is culture itself, and not
culture as a symptom or sign of something else, that becomes, really for the first
time, the actual focus of concern. The two factors are crucial to an understanding
of these changes: industrialization and urbanization. Together they produce other
changes that contribute to the making of a popular culture that marks a decisive
break with the cultural relationships of the past.
Popular culture has been criticized in some countries for distracting citizens
from concerns such as education and religion, and governments have both
censored and mobilized popular culture to further their ideological goals. Popular
culture produced in east and southeast Asia often reaches a global audience and
impacts the popular cultures of many parts of the world. Popular culture is an
integral part of daily life throughout east and southeast Asia, and reflects the
ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity of the region.
6.3 GLOBALIZATION AND ASIAN VALUES
Some government officials in East Asian nations have boldly proclaimed

an alternative to the Western cultural model by declaring an adherence to
traditional "Asian values." Asian values are typically described as embodying the
Confucian ideals of respect for authority, hard work, thrift, and the belief that the
community is more important than the individual. This is said to be coupled with a
preference for economic, social, and cultural rights rather than political rights. The
most frequent criticism of these values is that they run contrary to the universality
35
of human rights and tend to condone undemocratic undercurrents in some
countries, including the suppression of dissidents, and the excessive use of
national security laws.
Some commentators have credited Asian values as contributing to the

stunning economic rise of several countries in East Asia. It is also suggested that
Asians have been able to protect and nurture their traditions in the face of utilitarian
modernity, lax morals, and globalization. (Suh, 1997). Neighboring Singapore's
former leader Lee Kwan Yew has used the term to justify the extremely well-
ordered society Singapore maintains, and its laissez-faire economic approach. His
theories are often referred to as the "Lee Thesis," which claims that political
freedoms and rights can actually hamper economic growth and development.
According to this notion, order as well as personal and social discipline, rather than
political liberty and freedom, are most appropriate for Asian societies. Adherents
to this view claim that political freedoms, liberties, and democracy are Western
concepts, foreign to their traditions.
But critics argue that the concept of Asian values is merely an excuse for
autocratic governance and sometimes corruption. Martin Lee, the democratically
elected leader of the opposition in Hong Kong, has been severely critical of the
concept, calling it a "pernicious myth." Lee proclaimed that the Asian financial crisis
of 1997-1998 and ensuing economic collapse should mark the death knell of the
Asian values argument, and the "related notion that economic progress can or
should be made independent of the establishment of democratic political
institutions and principles.”
Other critics have leveled more strident criticisms against the use of the
Asian values argument. They argue that these supposed values have stymied
independent thinking and creativity and fostered authoritarian regimes. According
to this view, Asian values were partly responsible for the corruption that affected
so many nations in the region, making the press and people reluctant to criticize
their governments.
6.4 CULTURAL FLOWS
The pervasiveness of Western popular culture is common to most east and

southeast Asian nations. Korea was Asia’s biggest importer of Hollywood movies
in the 1920s and 1930s; Thailand was an avid consumer of American film musicals
in the 1950s; hits by the Beatles and Frank Sinatra have long resounded in karaoke
clubs from Mongolia to Vietnam; and each Harry Potter novel was eagerly
anticipated in the 2000s. Some Western pop culture has been more successful in
this region than at home. Danish band Michael Learns to Rock has won millions of
Asian fans with its easy-listening rock songs and American saxophonist Kenny G’s
36
song “Going Home” can be heard across China on trains and in shopping centers
at closing time or the end of long journeys.
Western popular culture’s reach into east and southeast Asia has met with
varying responses. Some have condemned its corrosive influence upon local
traditions, considering as a hindrance to the development of national culture.
People in the Philippines, for example, bemoan the “hamburgerization” of Filipino
culture and daily life. American fast-food joints are popular across east and
southeast Asia, enticing patrons with their Western-style decor, free Internet
access, collectable gifts, and sociable atmosphere. The infiltration of Western
popular culture has resulted in many hybrid cultural forms and practices. Burmese
rock (“stereo”) features Western pop melodies set to Burmese lyrics; Taiwanese
pop star Jay Chou mixes hip-hop beats and aesthetics with references to
traditional Chinese and Taiwanese culture; and British television formats such as
Pop Idol have been adopted in many countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam, and
Singapore.
Regionally produced
popular culture is often funded Examples:
by transnational capital and
Japanese cartoons (Pokemon, Hello Kitty)
targets multiple audiences.
Japanese popular culture was Computer games (Super Mario Bros., Dance
the most widely consumed Dance Revolution)
during the 1980s and 1990s,
although its popularization was Horror movies (Ringu, remade in the United
hindered in some countries by States as The Ring),
anti-Japanese sentiment
Chinese martial arts films (Hero, Crouching
stemming from the country’s
colonial past. More recently, Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
South Korean pop songs and Famous Stars (Jet Li, Jackie Chan)
television dramas, known as the
Korean Wave, have become
hugely popular throughout Asia. Both South Korea and Japan are known for their
productive popular culture industries, which churn out commercial pop acts like
Korean boy bands Super Junior and Mandarin-speaking Super Junior M, and all-
female Japanese supergroup Morning Musume. Countries with smaller
populations, less affluent pop industries, or which are less fashionable, tend to be
bigger importers than exporters of popular culture. East and Southeast Asian
popular culture has a considerable impact on global popular culture.
37
6.5 WESTERN VALUES AND ISLAM
The controversy over westernization had major historical implications in the

Middle East over the past several decades. Globalization is accelerating some
people’s concerns about the infusions of Western values in Islamic countries. In
the 1960s and 70s, the Shah of Iran sought rapid modernization--regardless of
conservative Muslim opinion. His plan called for land reform designed to aid the
poor, the extension of voting rights to women, and the allowance of the formation
of political parties. His plan, along with other social and economic changes, led to
increased resentment and hostility toward the Shah. Rightly or wrongly, reform
efforts became symbolic of what was wrong with Iranian society. Fundamentalist
clerics began to rail against Iran’s “westoxification,” and brought about a radical
revolutionary movement that sought to expel all western influence from their
ancient civilization.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has likewise adopted an approach with the
motto “modernization without westernization.” Seeking in part to avoid the kind of
outcome seen in Iran, the Saudi regime has strived carefully to limit the
encroachment of many values that westerners consider fundamental.
Consequently, Saudi Arabia guarantees no voting rights, and censorship of all
things Western, including movies, alcohol, and Internet access, is deep and
thorough. One such example is a new Saudi police issue ban on pet dogs and
cats. As noted by foxnews.com (Thursday, July 31, 2008):
“Saudi Arabia Bans Sale of Dogs and Cats in Capital

in Effort to Keep Sexes Apart
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia's Islamic

religious police, in their zeal to keep the sexes apart, want to
make sure the technique doesn't catch on here. The solution:
Ban selling dogs and cats as pets, as well as walking them in
public.
The prohibition may be more of an attempt to curb the

owning of pets, which conservative Saudis view as a sign of
corrupting Western influence, like the fast food, shorts, jeans
and pop music that have become more common in the
kingdom.
Pet owning has never been common in the Arab

world, though it is increasingly becoming fashionable among
the upper class in Saudi Arabia and other countries such as
Egypt.”
38
The aforementioned clash between Western values and Islam culture
reached an all-time high on September 11, 2001 with the terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center in New York City. The event widened the chasm between the
cultures, exemplified by anti-America riots in several Islamic countries, or the post
9-11 ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ in the United States. Since the attack, assaults on
Arabs, Muslim, as well as South-Asian Americans have severely increased.
President Obama's policy of heightened security has led to complaints by privacy
groups that he has increased racial profiling. Defenders of the policy claim it is the
easiest way to target potential threats, even if racial profiling is considered a "dirty
word" (Fox News, 2010).
More recently, however, during the recent Arab Spring, western cultural
values were used to achieve popular political goals in the Middle East. Western
cultural staples such as social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter were
essential to the organization of recent uprisings in the Middle East. According to
The National, “nearly 9 in 10 Egyptians and Tunisians surveyed in March [of 2011]
said they were using Facebook to organize (sic.) protests or spread awareness
about them” (Huang, 2011). And almost all of these protests came to fruition,
inciting popular political action through westernized means.
The use of social media in political unstable regions can be seen in the
years following the Arab Spring of 2011, Egypt's Supreme Military Council used
Twitter to make official announcements until the deposition of Mohammed Morsi.
Social media outlets have also been used to achieve short term political goals by
some groups, making use of its anonymity and global reach to spread rumors and
influence public opinion (Morrow & al-Omrani, 2013).
KEYWORDS
Asian Values Cultural Awareness Cultural Flow Cultural Product
Cultural Services Global Culture Hamburgerization International Trade
Islam Local Culture Modernization Multicultural
Traditions Values Westernization Westoxification
39
REFERENCES:
Globalization and Popular Culture, 2015. Sage Publications. Pages 219-224.
Retrieved from < https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-
assets/66098_book_item_66098.pdf>
Inwood, Heather. (n.d) . Popular Culture. Ohio State University. Retrieved from
<https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-
man-scw:210986&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF>
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
40
CHAPTER 7
Pop Culture in the Digital Age
• Understand the effects of various changes in pop culture in the

Digital Age.
• Assess and evaluate the pros and cons.
• Identify and explain the essential roles of the youth in the
development and future society.
"Popular culture is power, and whoever wields it to manipulate

minds is likely to find its literary and technological machinery turned
against him when the minds it has manipulated discover its potency as a
political weapon." (Lumbera, 1984)
7.1 THE THEORY OF THE NETIZEN AND DEMOCRATIZATION OF MEDIA
The word netizen, though it has been used popularly in current times, is a
word from the theory of Michael Hauben (1996) is a corrupted term from the phrase
"Net Citizen". According to Hauben, as netizens, geographical separation in the
actual reality is replaced by existence in the same virtual space called the internet.
More so, along with the power of using the internet is the power of the reporter
given to the netizen for a netizen could be a source of primary information
regarding certain topics or issues. Hauben profoundly cautions that the internet
can, nevertheless, be a "source of opinion" though he said that a netizen can train
him/herself to discern real from fabricated information.
This prophecy will soon be reflected in Graeme Turner's book called the
Demotic Turn (2010) but in a certain extreme way for even news reports are often
bent to suit the "infotainment" genre favored by the general audience. According
to Turner, there is a rise of opinionated news as reporters tend to bend the news
to the stories, they often favor. A concrete example of this is tabloidization or
sensationalizing small news items and making a big deal out of such.
Michael Hauben's theory of the Netizen, when he coined the term in the
late 1990's imagined the world's physical limits collapsed via the faster streaming
of information and communication via the internet, and true enough, the effect is
limitless and transcendental -- quite a benchmark of a 21st century high
technology. Hauben also imagined the democratizing power of media, for
41
everyone can voice out their ideas via the internet, but this can only be achieved if
everyone in the society, even those in the margins, can be given the chance to
voice out their ideas.
In the Philippines, the internet usage penetration is more than 30% as of

2012, and is continuously rising (Yahoo-Nielsen, 2013). According to the same
survey, more Filipinos use tablets and mobile phones to access the internet, and
with the rise of smart phones in the country, we can assume that the projected
number can be rising exponentially. However, the democratization of media, even
if away from Hauben's ideal 100% penetration in the society, is still evident in the
society, and this is via social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and the like. Among the three, Facebook, is the widely used platform
(Yahoo-Nielsen, 2013).
Public opinion rises from these sites, proliferation of liberal ideas happen
especially in the Philippines for the government never censors the content though
there was attempt in the Cyber-crime law. The agenda and capability seemed to
prove its political worth in the Philippines last September 2013 when, as though an
Arab or Persian Spring that were so-called Twitter or Facebook Revolution,
through the facilitation of social media, many Filipinos all around the Philippines
and the world joined a simultaneous protest they called the "Million People March"
(Garchitorena, 2013).
READING ACTIVITY!!!
POPULAR CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE by Emanuela Patti (page75)
KEYWORDS
Advertisement App Branding
Compromise Equilibrium Convergence Culture Cyberspace
Digital Age Infotainment Internet
Netizen New Media Old Media
Social Media Social Media Influencer Source of Opinion
Blog Net Citizen Social Gaming
Democratization Technology
42
Video Corner…
From Kraftwerk to the iPhone, John Robb considers

the complex relationship between technology and
pop culture. He explores how technological
advances have impacted on artists while putting
music fans at the center of pop culture, for better or
worse.
Pop culture and technology: The shock of the
new | John Robb | TEDxExeterSalon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89CQ-TVSxV8
REFERENCES:
Patti, Emmanuela (2020). Popular Culture in the Digital Age. Retrieved from <
https://www.academia.edu/42309436/POPULAR_CULTURE_IN_THE_DIGITAL_
AGE>
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
43
CHAPTER 8
Commercial Culture
• Define and understand the concept of commercial culture.

• Explain the essential impact of mass media in pop culture.
8.1 POP CULTURE AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE PHILIPPINES
It is somewhat amusing that children in their formative years use

technology as though it is a basic necessity for their development. With this
statement alone, it is undeniable that commercial advancements in technology and
the facility of the world-wide web creates a sort of transcendence in a faster and
inclusive way that is not possible in the physical world. Nevertheless, if this very
modern concept, if not an advent of a futuristic one, would be collapsed in the
confines of a perspective of a still developing nation, what would be the outcome?
With these media vehicles, According to the Yahoo-Nielsen Survey

the so-called the fourth estate of the of 2013, the top three sources of media
government, one can actually
consumption in the Philippines come
deduce that watching favorite
from the television, the radio, and the
shows on the television, listening to
radio programs, or even surfing the
continually rising internet usage.
world-wide web can have political,
social, and economic implications.
The Agenda-Setting Theory
The Agenda-Setting theory of McCombs and Shaw can simplify by saying

that he media influences people to focus its attention on something under a certain
agenda. It can make people think that something is happening when something is
not or give special attention or focus on certain subjects or topics and hype it to
make an impression that something big is going on. To give an example, the
agenda-setting theory can be seen in a newspaper wherein the headline is
supposed to be the biggest news there is, and the other items, decreasing in font
size and the farther its location from the front page, the lesser priority it has.
Similarly, in a news program, wherein the reporter or news anchor gives too much
airtime to a certain news, or depending on the arrangement of the news items, the
44
more pressing issue it is. This theory can also be applied in the radio, or on new
media such as the internet.
The political economy of media
According to Hermann and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, a model they

have used to check the various political-economic implications of mass media,
there are several filters to use in relation with the topic to check the propaganda
machine of mass media.
These filters are the following:
1. The size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, profit

orientation of the different mass media firms
2. Advertising as the primary income source of mass media
3. The reliance of the media on the information provided by the

government, business, and these "experts" funded and approved by such
sources and agents of power
The proponent, especially based on the history and origin of popular

culture in the Philippines, attributes the rise of popular culture to such technologies
like the television, radio, and the internet, and the popularization of the said
technologies because of the usage of such in the everyday culture. Nevertheless,
the seemingly innocent usage or consumption of media in different ways beholds
power in its interstices.
The easier to figure out

among the three is the economic. Vulgarization of Art - art forms were
According to Lumbera, popular popularized by the use of technology
culture in the rise of technologies and were tailor-fit to exactly serve the
like the television and the radio, taste of the greater audience, sacrificing
soon deteriorated the notion of art its quality in the process.
and made it appear that it is
consumable and a commodity. He
called it, as he said, according to other artists of the time, vulgarization of art. This
phenomena or grievance, if one may call it, can also be seen in Turner's argument
regarding the rise of infotainment. Infotainment is the trend of making an issue
seemingly pressing enough to give an ample or little new information, but more so,
entertainment to the public.
According to the Yahoo-Nielsen 2013 Survey, infotainment is one of the

most searched content and sites most visited in the Philippines. This meant a lot
of irrelevant news we see on the television or internet that can be dismissed as a
fad but were given the limelight to amuse people, and people seem to buy it. Just
45
look at websites like Yahoo, itself, for it offers a lot of interesting articles which may
seem to catch the interest if the public but also to cross-promote.
Aside from acknowledging that the reason

Cross-promotion - is a why there is this so-called "vulgarization of the
term referring to the art" and the "rise of infotainment" to attract
promotion of an advertisers to advertise in commercial breaks
during television or radio shows, or popping-up in
advertisement in a very
the websites, cross-promotion has been a wide
subtle way inside another
practice and people can actually sense it but not
program, or the like.
look it straight in the eye. Imagine watching a
movie and seeing a product endorsement of the
main protagonist being used in it, say coffee, and he or she prepares and drinks
the coffee in one of the scenes -- that is cross-promotion. The latent or subtle
manifestation of endorsing products. Even in the internet, there are a lot of articles
planted just to make an advertisement and these are often the infotainment ones.
Even video games have cross-promoting activities, or even radio jockeys do it in
a very conversational and suave manner. For lots of years, cross-promotion has
been commonly practiced, but the problem does not end there.
Cross-promoting activities in various media platforms cannot always be

subtle, for there many now with explicit exercise of such, and in connection with
Lumbera's sacrificing the art grievance, it can already be seen that media does not
proliferate art, or material with high value but sacrifices all these, even the content,
form, and quality of popular culture just to use it as an advertisement as an
example, a whole dialogue o story plot can be twisted, to bend, bow and scrape to
the demands of the main benefactor -- product endorsements.
Socio- Political Aspect
It was a common saying that whoever has command of the economic

power also wields the political. In the study of pop culture and Philippine media,
one can already see that the economic and political aspects were highly mutual
conditions that are beneficial to each other. This statement is logical for, according
to Herman and Chomsky, media really gets all the income from advertisements
and whoever has the bigger sponsorship gets the media attention, or programs will
be bent according to how their product endorsement vis-a-vis cross-promotion
would fit.
It is important to notice, however, that media's power does not only reside
on the economic, but also to the monopoly of sources, as cited also by Herman
and Chomsky. There are limited sources by which media can get information, and
with it, they control -- government, businesses, and the like -- whatever is going in
and out of the information tube.
46
Moreover, one must also check the relation of media to its audience.
Because of popular culture, media is used to create a certain agenda on its
viewers, and the resulting relationship is a political one wherein the one controlling
here is the media company or institution. According to McCombs and Shaw's
Agenda-Setting Theory, media can make us think about something by conditioning
our minds in a very latent manner, most especially through salience. It means that
if ever the media company wants you to think about a political stand or buying that
special perfume, they will do it in repetition and via cross-promotion using several
advertising techniques. Surveys such as Nielsen give the media companies an
idea what formula would work on a sellable television show, or the like. This can
be equivocal with the idea that the "naked" news in several western news
companies are created not because they need people to watch news, but also to
make them watch and earn their share in the advertising arena. One can argue
that some news articles can be imaginary or bloated to be sensationalized and
newsworthy. Thus, media, through its influences, indirectly commands the people
to behave the way that is favorable to them.
This argument, however, is rapidly changing through leverage, for there is

a thing called media democratization and that relates to the rise of social media.
To break the monopoly of media conglomerates on the information flow can be
attributed with the democratization of media via the internet. In everyday life, one
can see the leverage done by media conglomerates in the social media scene by
making an account for famous reporters and television or radio channels so that
they can also make real-time broadcasting simultaneous with the real-time updates
of social media information dissemination (Garchitorena, 2013). This is soon
proved to be beneficial when media companies make news out of public opinion
often found in tweets or posts in social media sites, as predicted earlier on through
the rise of talk radios (Turner, 2010). There are even portions wherein mere
viewers, through mobile devices, are made to report on a first-hand account of a
storm surge or anything, and send the clip via internet instead of sending a real
and trained reporter to check out the situation. This phenomenon, will,
nevertheless, prove to be beneficial if Hauben's theory of a democratized society,
via the internet wherein all people are given access, plus the required training to
voice their selves out as Netizens, would materialize.
It will be the foundation of the media we see today, and it fleshed out
reasons why media commands economic, political, and social power in the
Philippines. Through several media theories, it was shown that in media's main
goal via the proliferation of pop culture creates a commercialized world as it
generated income through advertisements, and whoever command economic
power commands the political, as well. Media companies can also facilitate pop
culture to make their audience behave the way they would be favorable to them,
also because they monopolize the information stream. This can also be countered
with the democratization of media through the facilitation of social networking sites
and by projecting ideas as a netizen on the internet. This may cause leverage but
47
may not completely achieve its full potential for full democratization can be done if
all people in the society can gain full access with the said technology. It may also
have down effects for media companies can use Netizens as primary sources of
information, as though "empowering" them. This can also be countered with
education if the public on how to use social media that would benefit them.
The future of social media's political, economic, and social facility as a tool,
or a weapon, against media conglomerates and the advertising machinery, or the
government or any institutional agenda may still be achieved if the general public,
especially those in the margins who were always victimized by the false images
shown through media, should discover and use its full potential.
READING ACTIVITY!!!
Is Commercial Culture Popular Culture?: A Question for Popular
Communication Scholars by Matthew P. McAllister (page 81)
KEYWORDS
Advertisement Commercial Culture Commercialization Consumer
Cross Promotion Entertainment Infotainment Manufactured
Mass Media Media Conglomerates Media Vehicles Popular
Advertising
Profit Public Opinion Technology Television
Wealth Worldwide Web
48
Video Corner…
The media is supposed to tell us everything important:

so why, after spending so long with it, are we generally
so overloaded, confused and oddly unfocused on the
stuff that really matters?
POP CULTURE: What's wrong with the media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwPdAZPnk7k
Filipino Pop Culture/Commercial Compilation
(2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPjHU6rEbA
REFERENCES:
Mc Allister, Matthew. (2003). Is Commercial Culture Popular Culture?: A Question

for Popular Communication Scholars. Virginia Tech. Retrieved from <
http://php.scripts.psu.edu/users/m/p/mpm15/CommercialCulture.pdf>
ATTENTION!!!
GOOD LUCK!!!
49
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Parts of the module were lifted or adapted from different
sources, then were compiled. All credits and rights are
reserved to the authors or owners. No copyright infringement
intended. This is for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES
ONLY.
50
REQUIRED READINGS!!!
Chapter 3
HISTORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: THE PHILIPPINE CASE

Rolando M. Gripaldo, Ph.D.
De La Salle University, Manila
Cultural identity evolves with historical development. Sometimes the

evolution is so slow that the cultural identity of a community is identified as virtually
the same as that of centuries ago. This is usually the case for primitive ethnic or
tribal identities. In another case, the evolution is fast compared with the first case
such that the cultural identity of a community contains many foreign cultural
elements although it is still identified with many important ethnic cultural traits. In
the third scenario, the evolution is much faster than the second case such that the
cultural identity of the group assumes most of the foreign cultural traits, usually
those brought about by Westernization. In the last scenario, the evolution is fastest
such that the cultural identity of the community is very similar to the Western
cultural identity although slight vestiges of its ethnic or racial origin may still be
noticeable. The Philippine case belongs to the fourth scenario and the purpose of
the paper is to philosophically explain how such a scenario comes about.
Certainly, the current usage of the term “cultural identity” is contextual and
will have different meanings in different contexts. This is especially true when one
migrates to another country and, depending upon the context, he or she will be
culturally identified as of ethnic, racial, national, etc., identity.
This paper will argue that Filipino cultural identity is still something in the
making within the greater purview of the Western culture—a positive cultural
identity which Filipinos can be proud of and which foreigners can affirm in a
favorable light.
Introduction
History, on one hand, is defined as the study of the records of the past.
This includes written records, archeological artifacts, ruins, and even traditions and
literature orally transmitted from generation to generation. Cultural identity, on the
other hand, is that aspect or aspects of a culture that a people are proud to identify
themselves with and which foreigners usually mention with awe or admiration.
“Cultural identity” connotes something positive, admirable, and enduring. It also
connotes an ethnic or a racial underpinning. The Ibanag culture is ethnic while the
Ibanag as a Filipino (Malay race) is racial. In ordinary everyday speech, however,
“ethnic” and “racial” are sometimes used interchangeably.
51
A nation generally consists of different tribes, and so there is a tribal cultural
identity and a national cultural identity. It is possible in a war-torn country, as in a
civil war, or in a postcolonial nation that there are only tribal cultural identities
without a national cultural identity. And each tribe may want secession or complete
independence. They would not want to avail themselves of a national citizenship.
Cultural traits are aspects of culture and, at least, one or a group of these may
serve as a benchmark for cultural identity for as long as the people can positively
identify themselves with that benchmark and generally foreigners recognize it. The
Japanese sumo wrestling is one example. A negative cultural trait or tradition, as
in a tradition of corruption, could not serve as the identifying mark for cultural
identity acceptable by the people concerned even if foreigners would keep on
mentioning it.
This paper will examine the role that history plays in the molding of a
people’s cultural identity. In particular it will sketchily trace the evolution of the
Filipino national culture and identify aspects of culture that would explain the
present state of the Filipino culture.
History and Culture
The term culture may be defined broadly as the sum total of what a tribe or
group of people produced (material or nonmaterial), is producing, and will probably
be producing in the future. What they produce—consciously or unconsciously—
could be tools, clothing, cooking utensils, weaponry, technologies, unexpected
outcomes, mores, or codes as in religion, and the like. And they will continue
producing these things, probably with more improved efficiency, design or style,
and finesse. The “make” can be distinctly identified—generally speaking—with
their tribe or their period in history. If they discontinue producing, (e.g., a particular
tool), it is probably because it is replaced with tools of much improved efficiency.
The criterion of utility is one consideration here. The former tool has outlived its
usefulness.
Edward Tylor (1974) looks at culture as “that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society” (italics supplied). My emphasis is on the
human production or creation of culture. Production connotes an interiority, (i.e.,
coming from within the subject himself or herself), that reflects a lived experience.
Albert Dondeyne (1964) talks of historicity as emanating from humans, and—to
my mind—so is culturicity. Aspects of culture can be acquired, but once acquired
they are adapted, reconstituted to fit the existing cultural terrain (either of the
individual or the group), or reproduced. Cultural outcomes as in habits, norms plus
sanctions, and customs are sometimes unexpectedly, unintentionally, or
unconsciously produced. They are noticed as patterns or ways of thinking or
behaving much later in life. From time to time they are evaluated, reevaluated,
reproduced, reinforced, discarded, modified, or replaced. In other cases, when
these outcomes are determined by some goals or purposes, they are consciously
52
produced. Charles Taylor thinks of culture as a “public place” or a “common [social]
space” by which an individual is situated or born into, and by which he or she grows
in political association with others through a shared communication vocabulary.
While the person grows with culture, culture likewise grows with him or her. A
national culture is one that towers over and above the minority cultures
(multiculturalism) that aspire to become a part of the national culture by first
availing their members of “cultural citizenship” by gradually assimilating their
individual cultures to the culture-at-large.
If we reflect on the life of our ancient ancestors, it is unimaginable to think

that their collective memory is not essentially or virtually the same as their cultural
history, although much of these may have been forgotten or buried deep in the
unconscious. Their culture is distinctively the collective repository of all things:
political, social, artistic, linguistic, educational, economic, religious, mythical, legal,
moral, and so on. UNESCO (2002) stresses this collectivity of culture as a “set of
distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society.” It
includes “art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems,
traditions and beliefs.” It is only very much later that these divisions of culture are
given individual emphasis by social scientists and by humanists. And more often
we forget that they are parts or features of a people’s culture. Nothing goes beyond
culture, as culture over time is history.
Culture and Civilization
We all know that civilization grows out of culture. That is why we can say
that while we can have culture without civilization, we cannot have civilization
without culture. The word culture etymologically means “to cultivate” while
civilization originally means “citizen” (from civitas), which suggests urbanization or
city life with a strong political organization and bureaucracy. The former reflects
the process of refinement while the latter reflects the partial or completed process
of organized refinement. The refined person is a civilized person. He or she is
usually referred to as a “cultured person.” Culture in this regard, that is, “high
culture” is usually taken as equivalent to civilization. Below the civilized culture is
mass culture, or what is sometimes referred to as “primitive culture,” “barbaric
culture,” “low culture,” “uncultured,” “without culture,” or the like.
No doubt social scientists think in terms of their specializations. Even

among anthropologists they tend to focus on their respective fields. Leslie White
(1949) invented the word “symbolate” to refer to a cultural object that comes about
from the act of symbolization, such as a work of art, a tool, a moral code, etc. It is
argued that culture comes about simultaneously with symbols, for humans have
the capacity to use symbols (a type of sign), the capacity to invent or acquire a
type of language. Noam Chomsky (1975) argues that every human being has an
innate “language acquisition device.” Julian Huxley (1957) classified the social
world into “mentifacts” (ideological or belief subsystem), “socifacts” (social
53
relationships and practices, or the sociological subsystem), and “artifacts”
(material objects and their use, or the technological subsystem). Archaeologists
are diggers of past cultures and can only generally uncover the material remains
of a culture while cultural anthropologists focus on the nonmaterial or symbolic
aspect of culture.
Quite recently, an attempt is made in postmodernism to level off high and
low cultures. The pragmatist John Dewey (1960) started it all by arguing that we
should not limit art and its appreciation to art museums and art galleries. We can
find art in everyday life; in the quality of experience we enjoy. There is art when we
see a person with a beautiful face walking by, or one who is exquisitely dressed
up, or the elegant clothes in tribal festivals. We find art in a basketball player who
gracefully shoots a ball at the ring, or in a nicely decorated cooked food, or in a
superb workmanship by a car technician. Mike Featherstone (1991) describes the
leveling off process—the elevation of mass, tribal, and popular (“pop”) culture to
an equal footing with high culture—as a postmodernist feature of our present
civilization.
Cultural Identity
There is a political or an ideological underpinning in the notion of “cultural

identity.” An ideology is a set of values and beliefs that propels an individual or a
group of people into action. An identity, ideologically speaking, connotes a feeling
of oneness, an emotional acceptance of a totality or, at least, of features within a
given totality that one is proud of, an internal or psychological desire to project this
totality or its features to others with exuberance, and the anticipation that others
will recognize and accept it (totality) or them (features) with respect.
Cultural identity is an evolving thing—sometimes slow, sometimes fast.

Usually the dominant tribe of a nation will assume the national cultural identity. In
other cases, if there are two or more tribes whose cultures are congruous, then
they assume an identity using a national name other than the names of their
individual tribes, a name that is historically influenced or determined.
It is possible that a civilized nation will evolve into a post-nation.

Postcolonial nations of Asia are toying with the idea of a regional identity while the
nations of Europe are gradually being transformed into post-nations, or they are
evolving into a newly emerging regional identity called the European Union (EU).
The European Union has a common monetary exchange and has generally
transcended national boundaries in terms of commercial and labor concerns. Its
corporations are transnational: they do business everywhere. An EU citizen can
travel, purchase items, and work anywhere in the Union without a passport or a
working permit. Eventually, the EU will assume a regional cultural identity.
Unfortunately, some nations—usually postcolonial ones or those nation-

states that were once colonies—are still struggling to evolve a cultural identity
54
which they can be proud of, an identity that is not just racial or ethnic but one that
lies above ethnicity.
The Philippine Situation
Four Groups of Filipinos
In the Philippine situation, there are many tribes and in the hinterlands we
can still find tribal identities—small groups of people wearing their tribal clothes
and doing their tribal ways. They are Filipinos in the “cultural citizenship” sense,
that is, their national identity is defined in terms of the provisions of the constitution:
namely, they are native inhabitants (born here with indigenous parents) of the
country. For many of them, their cultural citizenship does not mean anything at all
(the Aetas, for example). They know that their ancestors have been living in this
country several centuries ago.
We can also find a second group of tribes in the Philippines whose cultural
identities have been touched by modernization (which in this context is the same
as Westernization) in a minimal way. Some of them sent their children to school
and they are generally aware of their cultural citizenship. They go to urban areas
in either tribal or modern clothes but when they go home, they wear their tribal
attire. They identify themselves more as a tribe rather than as a Filipino.
A third group of tribes are those that are more modernized compared to the
second group. They send their children to school and when they visit the urban
areas, especially the big cities, they wear modern clothes and adapt to the ways
of modernity. Their identity is defined in terms of their religious persuasion. Some
of the educated attend parties and dance in disco houses. They generally identify
themselves as Filipinos. But when they go home to their native places, they adjust
themselves again to their native or religious ways. There are sectors in this group
that spurn being called Filipinos and prefer a different label such as “Moro” or
something else.
The last group of tribes is the highly modernized (Westernized). They are
the largest group consisting of various tribes such as the Tagalog, Bisayan,
Ilokano, Kapampangan, and others. Their common perspective is outward or
global rather than inward or national. The nationalists or the inward-looking
Filipinos in this group are a minority. Renato Constantino (1966) identified them in
the article, “The Filipinos in the Philippines,” as the genuine Filipinos. The
nationalists are proud of their cultural citizenship and their cultural heritage. They
want the country to become a first world in the coming centuries. They want the
country to be industrialized and later super-industrialized. They want to see light
and heavy industries churning out cars, tractors, airplanes, ships, rockets, and the
like. They want political parties with broad programs of government on how to
make the country industrialized or super-industrialized and not a crop of political
55
parties and leaders whose main concern is to be in power or to grab power to serve
their own selfish interests or pretend to work for the national interests where their
idea of “national interests” is vague or misdirected. They reject any group whose
economic perspective is provincial despite the advent of the Third Wave
civilization, whose outlook is limited to only agricultural and small and-medium-
scale industrial development and modernization, and whose labor scenario is to
train the workforce into global “hewers of wood and water,” into a “nation of
nannies,” or into a nation of second- or third-class workers. They want to build
institutions that run into decades but whose fruits are of great significance to nation
building. But they are a minority.
The Making of a Cultural Identity
“Damaged Culture”
The present cultural situation has been described as the result of a

“damaged culture” (Fallows 1987) where there is lack of nationalism and where
what is public is viewed in low esteem, without much national pride. The argument
is that the indigenous cultures of the mainstream tribes have been supplanted with
Christian and Western values brought about by Spanish and American colonialism.
Spain fostered docility and inferiority among the natives while America introduced
consumerism and the global educational outlook. Both Spain and America
supplanted the native cultures with the combined cultures of Christianity,
capitalism, and liberal democracy. Christianity was imposed among the natives
and accepted with reluctance, that is, it was blended with native religious and
superstitious beliefs such that the resulting Catholic religious version is theandric
ontonomy (Mercado 2004), a blend of the sacred and the profane, a compromise
between acculturation and inculturation.
The Chinese and Spanish mestizos (together with foreign transnational

corporations) whose Philippine nationalistic sentiment is generally suspect,
basically control capitalism in the Philippines. It is said, for example, that the
brochures one read at the planes of the Philippine Airlines (controlled by the
Chinese Filipino Lucio Tan) do not promote the many Philippine tourist spots and
products while other Asian airlines promote theirs. A Philippine Airlines brochure,
for example, had the Malaysian Petronas Twin Towers at its cover.
The native political system, the barangay, was of different ideological

persuasions, two of which were fully documented: the autocratic and the
democratic. The autocratic, of course, was authoritarian or despotic while the
democratic had a jury judicial system and a consultative legislative system. The
datu or chieftain always consulted the elders. Spanish colonialism practiced the
autocratic system while American colonialism trained the Filipinos in the
democratic system. However, the liberal democracy that developed was the
presidential—not the parliamentary—system, and the Filipino version of it always
56
became a clash, instead of a partnership, between the executive and legislative
branches of government. The consequences were inefficiency in the passage of
vital laws, delays in the approval of the annual budget that likewise delay the
needed financial increases in the delivery of basic services, nontransparent
accountability of executive officials through the legislative system in terms of
financial expenditures on certain projects (thereby fostering accusations of alleged
corruption), and the apparent political opposition’s penchant attitude for legislative
inquiries not in aid of legislation but in aid of government destabilization (during the
time of the Arroyo administration). The net result of all these is the slow pace of
national development.
Right now, a number of people appear to favor the shift from the
presidential to the parliamentary system. In fact, many of them believe that the
main culprit why the Philippines lag behind its Asian neighbors in economic
development is the slow-responsive presidential political system. They want
distinct political programs such as a labor party that fights for labor rights as against
a party that favors the rich or other sectors of society.
CONCLUSION
While culture develops in history and history feeds on culture for its
development, some individuals and groups move faster in cultural and historical
development while others lag behind in various stages of growth. This is not only
true among persons and tribes but also among nations or states. Filipino
nationalists and patriots describe the Philippines as a nation without a soul, a
cultural shipwreck that does not know where it is going. It is said to be a “damaged
culture,” with nothing much to be proud of historically as a nation. Its Christianity
is sacrilegiously adulterated (see Gripaldo 2005c), its declaration of independence
shortlived, its political leaders apparently directionless (their goals are at cross-
purposes with each other such that the net effect was to cancel out), and its culture
largely draped with colonial and crab mentalities. At this point in time, the Filipino
people should not think of what the Filipino nation or its political leaders can do for
them, but of what they as ordinary citizens can do for their nation. Some ordinary
citizens are better situated than others, and while their political leaders may still be
wondering what is wrong with them, these better-situated citizens can take the lead
in pursuing a grand vision for their country through civil societies. The task of these
societies should be to restore hope among the hopeless, provide the means for
them to develop a sense of human dignity, and to take pride in their own produce,
on their own effort toward cultural development and nation-building.
57
PHILIPPINE POPULAR CULTURE: DIMENSIONS AND DIRECTIONS THE
STATE OF RESEARCH IN PHILIPPINE POPULAR CULTURE
Doreen G. Fernandez
Philippine Studies vol. 29, no. 1 (1981) 26–44
Popular culture in the Philippines is a concern of recent awareness, recent

exploration, and even more recent definition. Consider the country whose popular
culture is in question: a Third World, developing nation; with many indigenous
ethnic groups still definitely unurbanized; with a long history of colonization that left
behind at least two immediately discernible layers of cultural influence, the Spanish
and the American, and a less discernible (being more deeply assimilated) one, the
Chinese; in a present socio-economic state that is still predominantly agricultural,
semifeudal (many feudal structures, especially in agricultural practices and related
lifestyles continue, barely changed), and neocolonial (dependent on foreign
economies, especially through the pervasive presence of multinational
corporations). It is clear that definition of what is popular in the Philippine context
can be no easy task. Consider further: although the root word involved is populus,
the people, the meaning "popular culture" has taken on in this day is not just "of
the people" but more specifically of the mass, a mass generally understood to be
urban and industrialized. Applied to the Philippines and its peoples of different
levels of urbanization, with only a small percentage being urban and industrial in
the Western mode, the term has to take on shades, sub meanings, and
distinctions, all of which demand preliminary explanations.
Mass media-generated culture in the Philippines is what can be properly

called popular culture, and this is of recent vintage. The electronic media - film,
radio, television, the large-circulation press - were established in the Philippine
scene early in the twentieth century, but because of economics their sweep is still
largely and exclusively urban (not all rural areas have cinemas nor are they
reached by newspapers and magazines; it is only since the transistor radio that
the hinterlands are touched by electronic media; and to date only relatively few
households are reached by television).
Research in the field is comparatively young, having started out in the

sixties as mass communications research. The factors that led to this were: the
recognition of mass communications as a vital, current field of endeavor and
inquiry; the sending of scholars to schools abroad, and their return with questions
about the Philippine situation; the establishment of the University of the Philippines
Institute of Mass Communication and of mass communication programs in other
schools; and government interest in the relation of mass communication to
development. Mass communication research, concerned with content (content
analyses) and effects on the audience, is the earliest form of popular culture
research in the Philippines, although it is of course not meant as such.
58
In the middle seventies there came the literature scholars who began to
examine film, television, radio, and comics as modes of fiction and drama - in
different media Their concern was that of the cultural critic, and was derived from
that of the literary critic: in this new form, what cultural values were being
transmitted? Again: how well was the transmission being done? – to whom, with
what effect, and to what purpose? This concern was bred by the recognition that
"serious" literature - the novel, the short story, the poem, the play - was not
reaching the great majority, not even the urban masses, and certainly not the rural
masses. Even more urgently, since 1972 and the imposition of martial law, there
were few outlets for the short story and the poem, and only one, Liwayway and its
regional brethren, for the popular novel. Plays were hardly ever published except
in university-based publications (how far could those reach out?), and when
performed, reached only those of the immediate spatial community, the urban
community, the school community, the town, the barrio. Any literary product
reaching the people was getting there through the media, and that reach, that
power, needed to be studied, analyzed, evaluated.
Perhaps it would now be expedient to go through each major area of

Philippine popular culture and briefly examine its history, and the state of research
done in the field. Television will not be treated, since it shares its principal offerings,
drama, and music, with radio, yet does not reach nearly as wide a public.
Komiks
The first Filipino comic strip was "Kenkoy," which first appeared in 1929,
its main character a city slicker through whom creator Antonio Velasquez
commented on "the foibles of Filipinos grappling with the new manners and mores
brought about by urbanization." It then consisted of four frames, used as a filler in
the popular weekly Liwayway, but eventually grew to a full-page feature. By 1931
other comic strip characters joined slick haired Kenkoy, almost all of them
modelled on American A comics characters: Kulafu, who roamed the mountains of
Luzon as Tarzan did Africa; Huapelo, the Chinese corner store owner (long a stock
figure of fun in Philippine life, fiction and drama), Saryong Albularyo, the barrio
doctor whose last name meant quack; Goyo and Kikay, local counterparts of
Maggie and Jiggs, and so on through the years and the changing fashions to
eventually include today's superheroes, horror stories, science fiction,
preternatural creatures derived both from lower Philippine mythology and from
Western sources. And so there appear Dyesebel the siren; the flying Darna; the
Medusa-like Valentina, characters from Philippine folklore, otherworldly royalty
and nobility out of the quatrains of the awit and cordo, freaks of many persuasions
like phantomanok (phantom and rooster) and horse-bodied Petra, magical agents
of good like Karina and her flying kariton (pushcart), historical figures, sports
figures, and in a more realistic vein, people from daily life - martyred mothers and
drunken fathers and business executives and blue-collar workers.
59
Since 1972 and Martial Law, the komiks have also been used by
government agencies to carry such developmental messages as the Green
Revolution (home vegetable gardens), housing programs, and family planning.
The content - the dreams, the hopes, the values, the vision of life, the escape from
reality (that suggests the reality escaped from), the problems and their solutions,
the total world view reflected in the komiks - definitely makes the komiks popular
culture. Although not created by the consumers, these are created for a popular
and not an elite audience, by artists who, although motivated by profit, have their
finger on the public pulse, their ears cocked to the public voice, their minds tuned
to the public dream.
Komiks have been studied both from the mass communication and the
literary-cultural approaches in magazine and journal articles, and in theses. An
early study was Karina Constantino David's "The Changing Images of Heroes in
Local Comic Books," 1974. Dr. Reyes' subsequent work is pioneering, since
although it occasionally uses literary norms and methods, it takes the komiks as a
phenomenon of popular culture.
Film
The first films shown in the Philippines were short features called
cinematrografo, usually presented interspersed with zarzuela or vaudeville
numbers. In 1909, two Americans, Yearsley and Gross, produced the first two
locally made feature films, both on the life of Jose Rizal. The first full-length feature
film, was Jose Nepomuceno's "Dalagang Bukid," in 1919, which used the story
and the star of Herrnogenes Ilagan's zarzuela of the same name, the most
successful play of the type (it is said to have played at least 1000 times all around
the islands). The first talking picture in the islands was made in 1932 by Musser
and titled "Ang Aswang."
In 1924, there were 214 movie houses all over the Philippines, thirty-four
in Manila, nineteen in Negros, seventeen in Rizal province, sixteen in Pampanga,
fourteen in Laguna, thirteen in Tayabas, and five in Iloilo. By 1939 the Philippine
movie industry was fifth in the world in the number of talkies produced. There were
345 sound theaters in the country, a 25 percent increase over 1938, and eleven
movie companies with a paid-up capital of almost 430,000 pesos.' From then the
Philippine movie industry moved from the big-studio syndrome to the present
proliferation of small independent producers, battling such obstacles as high taxes,
(28 percent of gross earnings) high production costs, scarcity of raw materials, no
government help, little or no professional training for actors and technical staff,
and, most especially, competition from foreign movies which, until the last few
years, had exclusive hold over the first-run movie houses.
However, the Filipino film definitely has an audience. The movie houses
enjoy fair to full occupancy from 9 A.M. to 11 P.M. daily, a phenomenon that has
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disappeared from the West Television has not usurped the movie domain, since it
is not yet available to the mass audience - the workers, low-salaried employees,
household help, and their families, whose chief entertainment is the movies.
Of the films that fill the movie houses, an average of 120 each year (in the
last five years) are Filipino, but these are generally the ones that are mobbed, and
whose stars - Dolphy, Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor et. a1. - have become folk heroes
or, in the current lingo, "superstars." Filipino movies, moreover, enjoy a longevity
that foreign films do not. After they have gone through the first-run Metro Manila
circuit, which determines whether they will make a profit or not, they then go
through the provincial circuit, (where, rarely, some low-budget film, perhaps a
martial arts piece that flopped in Metro Manila, succeeds), then through the
second-run circuit, then through what might be called the third- and fourth-run
circuits, the cheap movie houses. By this time, the scratched prints are in the same
decrepit state as the smelly, bedbug-infested, non-airconditioned movie houses.
Finally, they move on to television, where they can practically live forever.
There are no film archives in the Philippines, no film libraries even in the
vaults of the former Big Four - Premiere, Sampaguita, Lebran and LVN Studios -
and so the television run is of value to the film student or historian as being the
"living morgue" of the Filipino films that survive.
Radio
In June 1922, three 50-watt stations owned and operated by an electrical

supply company and organized by an American, Henry Hermann, were given
temporary permits to set up stations in Manila and Pasay. The stations were mainly
for demonstration, and for about two years provided mostly music for the few who
owned sets. They were replaced by a 100-watt station, KZKZ.
By 1939 there were four stations owned by department stores, which used
them mainly to advertise their own merchandise. Advertising in radio by companies
other than the owners began in 1932. Radio control laws were promulgated at
about the same time that these outside advertisements began to be accepted.
Radio in the thirties is said to have gained almost as much glamor as the movies,
since newspaper attention was lavished on radio personalities, just as it was on
movie stars. "Sunrise Club" and "Listerine Amateur Hour" were the more popular
radio shows.
During the Japanese occupation, all radio stations were closed, except
KZRH, which was renamed PIAM. Reception on shortwave was strictly forbidden,
but many receiving set owners risked their lives to listen to broadcasts of "The
Voice of Juan de la Cruz," the "Voice of Freedom" from Corregidor (till May 1942)
and the Voice of America. It was on these hidden radio sets that the underground
newspapers depended heavily for information on the war.
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But 1945, and the end of the occupation, heralded the real birth of
Philippine radio. Within five years after the war, there were thirty operating stations.
In 1961, the largest broadcasting chain in the Philippines began to be formed, first
as the Bolinao Electronics Corporation, which became then the Alto Broadcasting
System, then the Chronicle Broadcasting Network, which after Martial Law became
the Kanlaon Broadcasting System.
A survey made in 1969 by the Economic Monitor showed that 62 percent

of a total of 6,347,000 households had radio sets, and there were 1.5 million sets
in the islands. In Rizal province, surrounding Manila, 50 percent of the homes had
radios, whereas 4 in Albay only 4 percent. In Manila, 87 percent of the households
had radio sets. It was obvious that radios were massed in urban centers.
In the barrio, therefore, where the traditional - and often the only - method
of spreading or getting information was by word of mouth, the transistor radio
became a towering presence, bringing news of the government and of the city and
its problems; infusing pop music into the domain of the kundiman; spreading, in
effect, popular culture beyond the urban sprawl and into the rural folk realm.
The two principal forms of popular culture conveyed by radio are popular
music (which will be dealt with later in this article) and the radio soap opera. Both
have been studied in different ways by mass communications researchers,
principally through content analyses and surveys determining the effects on the
attitudes of listeners. The two principal writers who have used other approaches
are: Virgilio V. Vitug, poet and journalist, who takes a historico-critical approach,
and Jose Javier Reyes, who takes a semi-literary approach. Vitug, calling the radio
soap opera "Pabrika ng Luha at Pantasya,"' feels that the scriptwriters are
"imprisoned" by time constraints (they write two to four scripts daily) and by formula
plots, and should awake to their responsibility to make radio drama an instrument
for awareness and education, and thus a spring of information and truth. Reyes
studies the female roles in the dramas - the expected and unrelenting martyrdom
that make the heroines dominant over the males, and that causes tears to fall on
the audience's ironing boards – and asks: is this reflected reality, the authentic lot
of woman in semifeudal Philippine society, or is it instead the source of an idea
that has been successfully implanted through all these years? One might note at
this point that the longest-running shows on radio were the serials "Ilaw ng
Tahanan" (nine years) and "Gulong ng Palad," recently translated to television,
both built on the foolproof formula of cascades of tears and flocks of martyred
women.
Popular Magazines
The first magazine of general circulation (vis-a-vis those of special interest,

for example, the religious weeklies of the 19th century) in the Philippines was
probably The Philippine Magazine, published in 1905. It cannot quite be called
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"popular," however, since it was in English, and therefore, not available to the
majority, especially at that time, when the teaching of English had begun only four
years earlier. Perhaps it is the Philippines Free Press which should be called the
first, because although it was in English, it was printed on cheap newsprint and
eventually, by the time it stopped publication in 1972, was indeed read by the
majority of the English-speaking Philippine public.
Quite obviously, a real popular magazine would have to be in the

vernacular, and although there have been many short-lived publications in this
century, the popular magazine was definitely Liwayway, started in 1923, and which
by 1941 had a circulation of 89,000. With its sister publications Bisaya, in Cebuano
Visayan; Hiligaynon, in Ilongo Visayan; Bannawag, in Ilocano, and Bicolnon in
Bicol, Liwayway became the cornerstone of popular publishing in the Philippines.
To date, only Bisaya and Bannawag remain of the provincial weeklies, but
Liwayway is an institution.
More definitely within the domain of the popular culturist are the women's
magazines like Women's Home Companion, Women's Journal, Mr. & Ms., Mod,
and even the spicy Jingle Extra Hot (recently lost to the anti-smut campaign).
These sell “a couple of hundred thousand issues per week,” mostly in Metro
Manila, and are in English, with occasional Pilipino sections.
Dr. Soledad Reyes sees them as escape literature for "bored housewives.
. . harried office girls, ordinary clerks, pimply schoolgirls, old maids, pseudo-
sophisticated college girls, overworked teachers and other kinds of women - from
seven to seventy." They supply emotional crutches, support for sagging morale,
assurance that the reader can be transformed into a ravishing sophisticate through
a great diversity of articles (mostly syndicated) that fall into a pattern of success.
First there are the "how-to" articles on being beautiful, being sexy, etc. Then the
"intimate glimpses" into the lives of the jet set, the celebrities, the stars. Then a
tour of beautiful places, and finally enough of a dose of psychology, or medicine,
or psychiatry to top up the package.
This is a field relatively unexplored by research. There are a few mass

communications studies, and two essays by Dr. Reyes, one on the image of
woman that emerges from these magazines, and the other on its being a "dream
factory.
Popular Music
Until as recently as seven years ago, pop music in the Philippines was
definitely American. There was popular music earlier - kundimans, zarzuelas, love
songs, street songs, children's nonsense songs - and although some of these
actually found their way into records, they were not sung on vaudeville stages or
spun out on the airlanes. Even the nationalism and activism of the late sixties and
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early seventies did not change the steady diet of American pop, rock, and
Broadway on the airlanes, TV variety shows, and stage shows, although they did
arouse an interest in old Philippine songs which were sometimes reworded to suit
new conditions.
In 1973, however, Joey Smith and his Juan de la Cruz band experimented
with what later came to be called Pinoy rock. The sound was heavy Western rock,
but the lyrics were in Pilipino, and pleaded for "our own music." Soon came a group
called the Hot Dog with a slowed down, melodious beat, and a hit with a title in
Taglish, "Pers Lab" (lyrics in Taglish and colloquial Tagalog). When serious poet
Rolando Tinio translated an album of American songs into Pilipino for singer
Celeste Legaspi, producing songs so beautiful they seemed newly composed, the
Pinoy trend was on. The Broadcast Media Council gave the spontaneous
movement a boost by requiring each radio station to play at least three Filipino
songs every hour (an indication of how much American music was being played).
Some radio stations responded by having all-Filipino programs, and suddenly
Pinoy pop had arrived, aided by prizes and contests for performers, lyricists, etc.
and especially by the Metro Manila Pop Song Festival with its generous prizes for
winning songs. A phenomenal, untrained composer-singer, Freddie Aguilar, went
international with "Anak," in which " musicologists saw, beneath the folk beat,
strains of indigenous pre-Hispanic music.
The Literature of Popular Culture
The literature of popular culture consists mainly of: a) reportage and

feature stories in daily newspapers and weekly magazines; b) reviews of films,
television shows, pop concerts or performances, and very occasionally, radio
programs; c) studies by mass communication undergraduates, thesis writers, and
scholars; d) studies by literature students and scholars; and e) studies by the very
few scholars (mainly originating from the disciplines of literature and sociology)
whose consciousness has been awakened to popular culture as a field of serious
research.
The problem with most of the above is that it is done in isolation, without a
clear perspective, and unlocated in a definite context. There is, in other words, no
concerted effort to define the Filipino through his popular culture, or to synthesize
findings so as to determine this culture's broad effects on him. The journalists use
journalistic norms - newsworthiness, currency, human interest. The mass
communication scholars tend to count and tabulate. Even when using content
analysis, which could be useful in identifying trends, values, attitudes,
philosophies, etc., mass communication studies tend to itemize and enumerate,
when quantification should be used only as a means towards explaining meaning
and significance. Literary scholars naturally tend to use literary norms in the critical
stances taken after themes are established, characters analyzed, implications and
values read.
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No one can be blamed, since each is using the methods customary to his
discipline, and most have not even realized that the material they are examining is
that "new thing," popular culture. What, then, should be done? Where are the
context, the perspective, and the methods to come from?
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Chapter 5
K-FASHION AND TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN GLOBALIZATION IN THE

PHILIPPINE SETTING
Carlo Jejomar Pascual Palad Sanchez
Continuing Professional Teacher Education (CPTE)
Bulacan State University
Abstract
K-fashion is a manifestation of technology-driven
globalization. Globalization, or the process of across-borders
interaction and integration, has been fueled by modern
advancements in Information and Communication Technology
(ICT). Popular culture, of which K-pop would be a good
example, is a manifestation of this process. It is likewise fueled
by technology, by the internet, by online means of acquiring
data. In this globalized age, ICT is an open source of
information on the rise and fall of K-pop groups. The access—
to these information—that they give also reflects their role in
the actual rise and fall of these global groups. In the Philippine
setting, technology-driven globalization manifests in popular
culture only indirectly. This process of interaction and
integration can be visibly seen in the more wearable and more
tangible products of K-fashion. With the internet providing
means to download free music and videos, Filipinos can
instead use their resources to shop for clothes, in both physical
stalls and online stores.
As a third-world country, the Philippines finds itself not

far above the modified poverty-line called the wash-line.
Despite this, however, they manage to innovate and find
creative ways to participate—become active receivers—of the
process that continuously connects the technological world.
The world is like a washing machine: it goes round and round.
For the past decade or so, globalization has been a very famous
topic of discourse among people from various fields. It is the thing of today;
it is what makes our current world turn. This paper attempts to present K-
fashion as a manifestation of “technology-driven globalization.” Specifically,
it aims to define what technology-driven globalization is, what K-fashion is,
and how the latter is a manifestation of the former in the Philippine setting.
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Technology-driven Globalization
The concept of globalization is known to almost everyone by now, it

is having been explained in various forms of informal and academic media.
Still, here is a definition from aptly-named website globalization101.org:
“Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people,
companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by
international trade and investment and aided by information technology”
(Levin Institute, n.d.) The root of the term is the word “globe,” and interaction
and integration in this regard is indeed on a global level. One finds further
in the definition: “This process has effects on the environment, on culture,
on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on
human physical well-being in societies around the world.”
As pointed out in the same webpage, globalization is not an entirely

new thing. Its roots have existed thousands of years back, from the time our
early ancestors started trading across rivers and seas. However,
globalization in its present sense goes way beyond mere instances of
perfume or fabric exchange. The world goes round and round: the process
of interaction and integration among people has progressed from “mere”
barter trades to complex technological networking. Bridges that connect
countries have well advanced: carrier pigeons became jets, bamboo rafts
became high-speed ferries, rivers became washing machines.
Globalization is not limited to the applications of modern information

and communication technologies (ICT) in the global scale. It is, however,
almost impossible to discount the fact that technology fueled globalization.
Technology made the world spin faster than ever. Advancements in
information technology and communication media made the effects of
globalization more visible and felt as its paved way to a much faster and
freer exchange among global nations. “Snails” of the post office have curled
up to shiny-ringed blue “E‟s” of the monitor screen, making mail and,
consequently, almost any information that would have been previously
difficult to gather accessible with one computer click.
Several months of waiting for a parcel from overseas has been vastly
reduced, to a few seconds no less. Information on government policies,
economic developments and trade are travelling the world through the
internet, through wireless waves and wires in waves (since kilometers of
communication lines are usually installed under bodies of water). The role
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of technology is explicitly mentioned in globalization101.org, as
globalization is said to be “aided by information technology.” Data on human
societies, the environment, political systems—all of these aspects affected
by this process, as in the definition above—are readily and easily available.
More often than not they are available anytime and anywhere to anyone
with an internet connection, to anyone who has an internet connection
anytime and anywhere.
Even without the above, the term “technology-driven globalization” is

almost self-explanatory. Globalization is process of interaction and
integration among different nations. Interaction and integration are made
possible by communication, or the two-way acquisition and processing of
information. These two are made possible essentially by ICT. Air mail used
to be the fastest across-the-globe carrier. The mail jet, however, has been
“replaced” by a much smaller yet more efficient paper jet, a digital folded
plane called the cursor.
K-Pop and K-Fashion
As mentioned, advancements in information and communication

technology fueled globalization and made its effects more apparent. Among
these, there might be nothing more apparent than its effect on culture, on
popular culture specifically. Extremely easy access to data in this case is
more frequently not limited to statistical or scientific information. Data in this
sense is both information on the latest trends, and the latest trends
themselves.
The latest on the popular culture trade, of which K-pop would be a

very good example, is readily available with just a few clicks. Be it news
articles, lyrics, or concert updates, all that needs to be done is to “search”
and the internet will provide in seconds. Pop stars can be brought down the
same way they shot to fame; performing groups get even more and more
popular with every single view of their video. Through cursors and a song,
people can interact with societies around the globe.
The world is like a washing machine: after warming up, it turns really,
really fast.
According to the author, between the years 1999 and 2005, 50 new
K-pop groups had their debut. The number increased to 30 new groups in
the year 2010 alone. In 2011, however, a sea of 50 new groups--the total of
a previous seven-year period--debuted in one single year (Dana, 2012). In
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total, the number of new groups formed between 2009 and the year the
article was written—a short span of four years—far exceeds the number of
groups that have debuted during the 13-year period between the years 1996
and 2008. Most of these groups were made known in Korea, and especially
in the world, through information and communication technology. Video and
music streaming websites (such as Youtube), free blog portals (such as
Multiply and Tumblr), and social media websites (such as the then-popular
Friendster, and the more recent Facebook and Twitter) are obvious
manifestations of modern ICT.
These groups were known, commended, made famous, and brought

to the top of the world charts and the peak of their global careers through
technology. It is also in the same manner that they were bashed, associated
with controversies, forgotten, and replaced with new song and dance
groups that will be subjected to the same popular-culture cycle.
Dana‟s (2012) article “Idol History: K-pop By The Numbers” accounts

for the number of groups that debuted in specific time periods. A debut,
however, does not automatically translate to seconds of fame, even more
so to a sustainable career. Not all 50 new groups that debuted in the year
2011, for example, were able to survive the spinning world of popular
performing arts. Groups shoot to fame as fast as other groups are
abandoned. With modern technology, 100 new K-pop groups could debut
in a single year, but the same number can also fail to become more than
flat statistics.
The above information was accessed with a few taps in a keyboard,

in a span of even fewer seconds. Data on the rise and fall of K-pop groups,
and their actual rise and fall, can be acquired, influenced, or controlled with
just a few clicks. Technology powers the globalization washing machine that
spins popular culture. Information on the existence of a single rising group
alone facilitates the spread of popular culture across countries. The extent
of this spread is even greater since on top of their identity, their albums,
promotions, charities, scandals, breakthroughs, and achievements travel
throughout the globe. With our current technologies, integration among
nations in terms of tradable popular culture can occur faster than a washing
cycle.
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The world is like a washing machine: in it is a bit of everything.
If we find time to look at every single piece of clothing that we dump

in a washing machine, we will see how this current wave of globalized
popular culture has reached the fibers that we use. Washing machines have
replaced rivers not only in the laundry sense, but in a way, in its
transportative essence as well. In general, the clothes that we wear and the
look we get from it resemble, no matter how vaguely, a popular “pop culture”
character or idea. The colored pants, the skirts, the neon shirt: these are
parcels of globalization that come in our personal colors and sizes.
Aside from the look, we see this modern river barter in the brands of
the clothes themselves. Cotton On, Uniqlo, Giordano: these global brands
will go round and round in the machine side by side with our favorite regional
and indigenous brands, advertised by or with our favored popular culture
personalities. We see manifestations of culture bridges in the H&M that
tumbles with the Zara, in the Samsung phone being rinsed in the pockets
of a 501. These traded piles of clothes can be considered as direct
merchandise and “products” of K-pop. As K-pop groups, and their music
and videos, are being sold and bought by consumers, they could also be
considered as products in their own regard. This allows for the occasional
“product on a product” merchandise in closets, for the Korean-style shirts
silk-screened with a photo of K-pop superstars.
One would best explore the K-pop phenomenon, and subsequently

articulate its extent in a certain country, by looking into album sales charts.
K-pop groups, first and foremost, sell their music, their songs, their videos.
Album sales, therefore, are the most relevant source of information on the
said topic, but it is not the only source. Data on K-fashion can also be useful
in exploring the extent globalization has been made manifest by Korean
popular culture. In fact, in some instances, it could be a more suitable
source.
In the Philippine setting, the consumer aspect of K-pop is more

apparent in clothing industries. Music albums in general are pretty
expensive. Additionally, the value of music albums lies in the satisfaction a
customer gets from playing it through a computer or music player. As music
is virtually “downloadable” from the internet at no cost, it would be
understandable if K-pop fans would rather spend their money on Korean
clothes. K-fashion is more wearable, and consequently more tangible and
visible than music albums. Indeed, some of these downloads are essentially
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forms of piracy, but non-illegal avenues where fans can download free
music and videos do allow them to allot their purchasing resources to the
more “practical” goods of K-fashion.
Globalization in the Philippines
The cursor has influenced the direction of the world. True to what a
digital arrow does, it has “pointed” nations to new currents, to entirely new
rivers to traverse. Modern ICT allowed for the concretization of globalization
that is visible even in the soapiest parts of the house. Although possibly
unaware, we encounter this concretization in almost everything, even the
clothes we wear. Still, this is all thanks to the advancement we have
achieved in mediums of global exchange. As previously introduced,
information on the latest trends, profiles of potential buyers and sellers,
contact between parties, and actual delivery can be made with a click of a
mouse. Even the integration among people, companies, and governments
that accompany all of these are made possible through global technologies.
It is globalization ferried into our closets.
As previously mentioned, international brands Cotton On, Uniqlo,

Giordano, Zara, and H&M were welcomed into the Philippine shores with
much anticipation. Filipino K-pop fans, therefore, would be much more
thrilled to welcome Korean brands that bring Korean fashion right at their
local mall’s doorsteps.
Jica Lapeña of gmanetwork.com reports the “arrival” of Korean

Fashion in the country (2013). The article narrated the opening of the first
branch of Basic House last December 2012. The said shop is located at
The Shops in Greenhills. A May 31, 2013 article from inquirer.net then
featured the Korean fashion brand’s second store at SM Megamall in
Mandaluyong. Aside from Basic House, the Philippines also became a new
home to global brand Mall of Korea. The headline of an article by Jamie
Sanchez (2016) of spot.ph reads: “Now Open: Mall of Korea, a fashionista's
shopping paradise.” The said shopping center opened July 14 of that same
year, at Metro Walk in Pasig.
In addition to the above, globalization can also be seen—and

arguably better seen—in the buffering symbol that turns round and round.
Korean popular culture—which thrived and has conquered the world
through ICT—is concretized by the same technological media. Online
shopping has been a thing of the global age, and Filipino boats have some
of the most avid rowers in this digital floating market. An article by David
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Dizon (2015) of abs-cbnnews.com shares a WeAreSocial report stating that
“Pinoys are top in Internet, social media use.” From these, one would not
be surprised to find out that the Filipinos‟ passion for shopping translated to
a love of its online counterpart.
Online shopping is self-explanatory: it is shopping on the line,

through the internet, through ICT. Technology-driven Korean pop culture,
and K-fashion, has made its way not only toward physical stalls but even in
virtual stalls. In a July 4, 2016 article by Louren, powerpinoys.com ranked
the “Top 5 Online Shopping Sites in Philippines.” Ranked from fifth to first,
in the list are Widget City, WeeMall, Goods.ph, Zalora Philippines, and
Lazada Philippines (Louren, 2016). The top two online shopping sites are
used as references for this paper, also because the other three sites mostly
cater to shoppers of gadgets and non-clothing merchandise.
The world is like a washing machine; it turns, but sometimes not as fast as
others.
The fresh scent of globalization, like almost everything, is not felt by

everyone. There is this side where things are not as “globalized.” In a TED
conference presentation, Hans Rosling (2010) presents in his talk “The
Magic Washing Machine” the differences in costs of living per day of people.
It is no new knowledge that there are groups of people living above, way-
above, and below the poverty line. What is notable from his talk, however,
is his new take on the topic. For Rosling, the absence or presence of a
washing machine in “less-globalized” households can show us the extent of
integration that “the rest of the nations” are experiencing. Indeed, there are
still a lot of people who “waste” their time washing clothes by hand, whose
“experience of the world” does not go beyond the mass-produced and
mass-consumed detergent that roughens their hands.
Introducing the terms “air line” and “wash line” that go with “poverty
line,” Rosling (2010) discussed the idea of washing machines, light bulbs
and poor people moving up the highly globalized economic ladder. There
are people—these people—who reside on the other side of the washing
machine. It is the side that, amidst all the „up and down‟ cycle of each turn,
never gets to ascend from the bottom of the round world. More than
researching for statistics, it is important to take note that these people,
regardless if they wash their clothes with their hands or with machines,
come across the same inter-societal bridges as people above the “wash
line.” Be it on less-advanced media, or through other means that they can
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barely afford to voluntarily gain access of, globalized popular culture
interacts with them.
The Philippine context, being a third-world country, is not far above

the “wash line.” What seems unusual, however, is how the fandom of
Filipinos is comparable to that of highly industrialized countries. A few taps
in ticket-selling websites will show that concert prices of international acts—
including K-pop groups—are usually a lot higher in the Philippines than in
the rest of Asia. The Philippines is not far above the wash line, yet it can
afford the generally pricey K-fashion goods. This could signify two things:
that Filipinos allot most of their usually limited resources for popular culture
products, or they make the most out of what they have.
The submission to counterfeit clothes—those with fake brands or

imitated prints of the latest in popular culture—is not an unusual thing in
Philippine markets. Similar to how most K-pop fans download their music
from free websites, they get their K-fashion fix beyond “authentic” clothing
stalls and shopping sites that directly import Korean products.
The Filipinos are versed with the non-traditional media that will allow
them to consume goods for a much lower price—or even for free. More so,
they may even be part of the production of these mass-produced goods, a
trend that has numerously been associated with small-time
entrepreneurship and the increased access to machines and raw materials.
The same ICT that allows for free music and video downloads makes it easy
for almost any computer-literate person to layout t-shirt designs. It is also
the same globalization-driving technology that will allow him or her to
manufacture, and eventually sell, these products—counterfeit or not.
The world is like a washing machine: It could stop turning, but it will
eventually begin another wash cycle.
Globalization is driven by international trade and investment.

Through the kind of information and communication technology that we
have, it has been rendering generally positive effects on culture, on
economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being
in a number of societies. The Philippines, though not “yet” a highly
industrialized country, has been highly efficient in harnessing the benefits
of ICT. Technology-driven globalization—of which popular culture is a very
powerful manifestation—would ever-continuously turn and bridge and
integrate nations and would eventually fully integrate the world into the
world. Today, communication media are aplenty: people have boats, people
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have the internet, people have powerful ideas and trends. In a globalized
world, nations continuously interact in a give-and-take fashion that goes
round and round.
K-fashion is a manifestation of technology-driven globalization. This

process of interaction and integration has brought forth a positive and felt
effect on human well-being around the world. The technology that drove it
to its current speed, and that continuously powers it, allowed Filipinos to
consume K-pop and patronize K-fashion within their own ways and means.
Technology has allowed Filipinos to dominantly “receive” popular culture of
the globalizing world. It also shows promise to allow the Philippines—and
its technologically articulate people—to be, eventually, on the dominantly
“giving” end of globalization.
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Chapter 7
POPULAR CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Emanuela Patti
Introduction
One of the defining phenomena of most contemporary cultures and

societies is the increasing penetration of the Internet. Social media,
including blogs, apps, social gaming, microblogs, and last but not least
social networks, have opened the doors to people’s participation in the
public arena of cultural, political and social debates, subverting the top-
down model of broadcasting and challenging the role of elites and mass
media. Virtually everyone who has access to these digital platforms can
express their opinions, creativity and social interaction in the form of texts,
images, and audiovisual materials, as well as order food, locate themselves
in space, keep and share records about their health, and so on.
The digital convergence of old and new media has taken postmodern
cultural and social practices of hybridization between high culture and
popular culture to the next level, overcoming class distinctions in
unprecedented ways. “Folk culture(s)”, “subculture(s)”, “mass culture(s)”
and “postmodernism” converge on the same media and overlap in different
ways. In this respect, as I argue in this chapter, “digital popular culture(s)”
seem to encompass all the definitions previously given to “popular culture”:
they are cultures made by the people for themselves, as they gather
communities with similar interests; but, they can become mass phenomena,
when they reach popularity with or without the collaboration of mass media.
Moreover, they “remediate” stories, cultural models, ideologies, and
lifestyles from other media cultures such as newspapers, movies, television,
radio, advertising, comics, as well as literature, theatre, fine arts of the past
and the present.
The Internet, new media and digital technologies have introduced a

new cultural dominant which requires a re-assessment of Gramsci’s
interpretative theory and methodology, as well of Eco’s semiotic approach,
in relation to our contemporary social and techno-cultural scenario. From a
media perspective, if Gramsci’s reflections on culture mainly revolved
around literature, on the one hand, and lived cultures, on the other, with a
special focus on the relationship between class and power, and Eco
reformulated them through semiotics in the context of mass media culture,
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we clearly need to rethink how their methodology can be adapted “when old
and new media collide” in the digital age of convergence culture (Jenkins
2006). Italian society has also significantly changed from Gramsci’s times.
Various waves of immigration have made it more diverse, although cultural
integration has been difficult. Italians are generally more educated -but not
significantly more than in Eco’s times- and they have been exposed to
decades of mass culture. We are facing old and new emancipatory
challenges, considering that Italian society is still considerably retrograde in
terms of sexism, racism, and support to civil rights. Scholars in Cultural
Studies have taken Gramsci and Eco’s theories beyond Gramsci’s focus on
class and power to include gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and ultimately
identity as a composite mix of all these categories. Today, the convergence
culture of the digital age raises new methodological questions.
“Popular culture” from mass media to digital convergence
In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (2015), John Storey aptly

remarks that “popular culture” combines two complicated words, “popular”
and “culture”, which, in their association, have taken different meanings
over time. A mindful discussion about this topic thus requires, first, a
definition of this conceptual category. In his 1983 Keywords: A Vocabulary
of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams suggested three broad
definitions of “culture”. First, “culture” can be used to refer to “a general
process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”. In this respect,
great philosophers, great poets and great artists play a significant role in the
development of a society. Second, “culture” can be used to indicate “a
particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” (Williams,
1983). This definition refers not only to intellectual or aesthetic productions,
but also literacy, festivals, cultural habits, youth subcultures, sport. In a
nutshell, this is what we can also call lived cultures in most urban societies.
Third, “culture” can be used to suggest “the works and practices of
intellectual and especially artistic activity” which contribute to the production
of meaning— what the structuralists and post-structuralists call “signifying
practices”. According to Williams, “popular” has instead at least four
meanings: “well-liked by many people”, “inferior kinds of work”, “work
deliberately setting out to win favor with the people”, “culture actually made
by the people for themselves”.
In line with these interpretations of “popular”, a first definition of

“popular culture”, as suggested by John Storey, is “culture that is widely
favored or well-liked by many people” (Storey 2015). A second way to define
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“popular culture” is in terms of a “residual category” with a certain pejorative
connotation: “popular culture” is “the culture that is left over after we have
decided what is high culture” In other words, popular culture refers to those
texts and practices “that fail to meet the standards to qualify as high culture”.
A third definition of “popular culture” is as “mass culture” which developed
with the rise of publishing and broadcasting (radio, cinema, television) in the
19th and 20th centuries. It results from people’s exposure to the same
cultural products, values, and lifestyles. Especially from the 1950s on, mass
culture has been often associated with American culture (and the “American
dream”)—whose influence on other cultures has more commonly been
defined in terms of “Americanization”. On the wave of the Cold War, various
European intellectuals, for example those of the Frankfurt School and, in
Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, have seen in this phenomenon an attempt to
spread the capitalist ideology and instill wishes and desires which led to
consumerism and cultural standardization. In this perspective, “mass
culture” is seen as “a hopelessly commercial culture [...] mass-produced for
mass consumption” [...] which represents a threat for either the traditional
values of high culture or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempted’ working
class”. A fourth definition of “popular culture”, following again the meanings
suggested by Williams, is a culture that originates from the people - in this
case, “popular culture” corresponds to “folk culture”. A fifth definition of
“popular culture”, as suggested by Gramsci, is as a “compromise
equilibrium” between the culture produced by the elites and/or mass media
and the emerging from below, oppositional culture of the people”. In this
perspective, “popular culture” is a site of struggle, based on “resistance” and
“incorporation”, between classes, genders, races, economic powers, and so
on. In this respect, Stuart Hall (2009), the father of Cultural Studies, argued
that “popular culture” theories are about the “constitution of the people”,
where the people are variety of social groups in society. Along these lines,
as Fiske (2001) noted, “popular culture” is what people make from the
products of the cultural industry—mass culture is the repertoire, popular
culture is what people make of it with the commodities and the commodified
practices they consume. A sixth definition equates “popular culture” with
“postmodernism”, a culture which does not recognize the boundaries
between high and popular culture, celebrating the end of an elitism
constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture. For some critics, this is the
final victory of commerce over culture (Storey 2015).
While these theories are still central in the investigation of popular

culture today, most of them belong to another era of cultural history; one
which was still strongly rooted in the mass media culture of 20th century.
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Mass media such as television, cinema, radio, newspapers, and advertising
continue to be influential at a cultural level today. However, first, they have
transformed and become part of a system of media convergence; second,
they do not fully represent the media landscape. Numerous other digital
platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Wordpress, Instagram, online
newspapers, video games, collaborate and/or compete with the cultural
production of so-called “old” media. Moreover, in the digital age, popular
culture results from a variety of practices which can be initially exclusive of
a specific social and cultural category (“the people” or subaltern groups,
“communities of fandom”, masses, elites), but typically tend to move across
these class distinctions creating new cultural phenomena and products, as
I will discuss in more detail below.
Digital technologies have become endemic of our cultural landscape

at many levels: in terms of lived cultures, including literacy, cultural habits,
subcultures, social life; in terms of artistic activity; and, finally, by shaping
the intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development of society, as the digital
turn in the humanities demonstrates. The previous definitions of “popular
culture” seem to all co-exist, in a way or another, in the contemporary digital
society. Consciously or unconsciously, these cultural practices are in fact
“widely favored or well-liked by many people” who regularly use them to
perform daily activities to communicate, socialize, work, learn, access and
produce knowledge and creativity, entertain themselves, and so on. Very
popular apps like Google Maps, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter,
Snapchat, Skype, Dropbox, Subway Surfers, LinkedIn, Academia.edu have
changed the ways we interact, speak, gather and disseminate information,
situate ourselves in space, etc. In their early days, many of these practices
were considered as “avant-garde” in relation to mass practices and
“residual” in relation to high culture—examples include the first experiments
of electronic literature which set the ground for today’s blogs, among other
digital genres, as well as the first online chat boxes which preceded dating
apps and social networks. Digital culture(s) have also many features in
common with mass culture. Phenomena like social media influencers, for
example, borrow the cultural models of mass media stardom and
authorship, as well as the aesthetic styles of television, cinema, and
advertising, but they adapt them to the more typical informal style of social
media where private and public spheres mix seamlessly.
However, in the way they express social and behavior customs, level
of education, linguistic inflections, and symbolic gestures of localities, one
can argue that they are the new “vernacular cultures”. Unlike the “folk
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cultures” we used to associate to non-urban cut-off communities,
contemporary ones are often the combination of national and international
mass culture, local and global societies, individual experiences and
education. They can be produced by individuals or groups and they are
spread quickly and widely, if they attract the attention of either big brands,
companies, mass media and/or institutions, they reach masses, and they
can have a moral, political, commercial or educational impact.
Crucially, in this new socio-technological scenario, one may wonder

whether a cultural studies perspective is still relevant and what its object of
study would be when it comes to identify power relations, forms of
incorporation and resistance and epistemologies of otherness. In digital
culture, meanings are not only produced at the surface level of
representation of contents (stories, images, audiovisuals), but, as Lev
Manovich has very well explained in The Language of New Media, also right
in the structural levels which organize and manage imaginaries and social
relations, namely code, interface, software, database. It seems to be still
appropriate to argue that in these sites where “collective social
understandings are created”, “popular culture” is a terrain on which “the
politics of signification” is played out in attempts to win people to particular
ways of seeing the world (Hall, 2009). Thus, what are the emancipatory
challenges we are facing today and in which “apparatuses” and “forms of
representations” should we look for the elusive core of convergence?
Conclusion
The term “brand” first emerged in the late 1880s to indicate goods
like Coca-Cola which stood out from competition. David Ogilvy, the “Father
of Advertising,” defined brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s
attributes”. It is a “person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or
organization”, according to the Dictionary of Brand. It is not a logo, it is not
an identity, it is not a product, but, as Marty Neumeier defined it, a brand is
“a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization”. In mass
media culture, we were used to see goods advertised on multiple media
platforms, such as television, magazines, advertising boards, gadgets, and
so on, with the specific purpose to construct a brand of the product. We
were exposed to various representations of the same object in our daily life
experiences and, finally, we synthetically got a sense of what that item
meant to us. What lies behind the most successful brands was a well-
thought and coordinated strategy of communication meant to provide a
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package of meanings, suggest model identities, connect with the masses’
wishes and desires.
In the age of convergence culture—where social media have allowed

virtually anyone to engage in a strategy of self-branding and where mass
media need to collaborate with new media to achieve effective
communication- people’s identities, like goods, are constructed as “brands”.
While this might not come as a surprise, what strikes is how this results
especially from the new media scenario in which we are immersed. The
increased tendency to take a “distant reading” of the reality which surrounds
us, including people, events, news, in combination with the fragmentation
of representations across multiple media, the overwhelming quantity of data
and cultural stimulation we are exposed to each day, the attention deficit
which affects more and more people, especially the Millennials, the rapid
evolution of technologies, all make us more prone to grasp the sense of the
world through branding. The concept of “branding” today goes well beyond
promotion, advertising, publicizing to potential masses for commercial
purposes. “Brand” today is how we manage to effectively communicate and
understand the meanings deriving from the variety of cultures which blend
in our stories, images, lifestyles. It is a snapshot of the multiple cultural
intersections which constitute today’s advanced societies; it is thus crucial
to develop the critical tools for a close reading of this emerging transmedia
textuality made of digital and non-digital media. This is after all the challenge
of “compromise equilibrium” which digital humanities, cultural and media
studies will face in their relationship with digital popular cultures.
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Chapter 8
Is Commercial Culture Popular Culture?: A Question for Popular

Communication Scholars
Matthew P. McAllister
Virginia Tech
Commercial culture may be a lot of things. It may be a subset of

consumer culture. It may be a defining element of mass culture. It may even
at times be high culture or “art,” as Berger (2000) and advertising creatives
(Soar, 2000) have contended. But, at least conceptually, the answer to the
title of this essay is no: Commercial culture is not the same thing as popular
culture. This stance can be qualified and is not universally shared. But
several scholars of popular communication emphasize the importance for
the popular of such concepts as participatory texts, authenticity, and
genuine pleasure, elements that may be less central to the commercial.
So if they are not the same thing, why should advertising—as an

intense form of commercial culture—be a topic of future exploration in the
journal Popular Communication? The commercial form should be studied
under this rubric because of the impact commercial culture has on specific
forms of popular culture. Communication scholarship, with its emphasis on
the power of the message, its mix of receiver- and sender-based modes of
understanding, and its interdisciplinary roots and nature, may offer unique
insight into this commercial impact. In addition, industrial practices and
trade discourse often assume the two forms of culture are the same thing,
and there are many social and economic forces that are pushing
commercial and popular culture together. Whatever form of culture or
communication that is coming out of this centripetal process should be
studied with many of the same theoretical, critical, and methodological tools
that define the best scholarship in popular communication and popular
culture. This scholarship also shows great potential to develop new
techniques and theories to grasp the ever-changing nature and growing
influence of commercial culture.
Many of the assumptions about the differences between the two

forms of culture come down to definition, of course. Commercial culture, for
example, can be defined as both commercial culture or commercial culture.
Commercial culture is the more far-reaching one, but also the one that does
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not necessarily involve as a central tenet the integration of advertising forms
with entertainment. This version, closely related to the idea of “mass
culture,” refers to culture that results from a commercial system, a system
where the profit motive overwhelmingly dominates. Heavy-duty marketing,
corporate ownership, and predictable production processes of cultural
products are involved. By this definition, commercial culture is huge. It
would include the big blockbuster film, the highly promoted network
television show, and the mass-market paperback romance novel.
To eliminate this category of culture from notions of “the popular”

excludes a lot of cultural forms and is therefore a potentially contentious
definition. Nevertheless, such claims are found. Arguing for the importance
of a distinction between mass commercial culture and popular culture is
Stephen Duncombe (1997) in his thoughtful discussion of “zines” as
underground culture. For Duncombe, popular culture is strongly associated
with another kind of culture, “participatory culture,” and for him the idea of
authenticity is central. From his perspective, mass commercial culture is
neither participatory nor authentic. He contended that commercial culture is
not popular culture. It may be popular, but its popularity is a means to an
end: that of being a profitable commodity. As a result, fans are continually
betrayed in their quest to make the culture theirs, and the process of
connection must be continually reinvented, ad infinitum.
Duncombe’s discussion of commercial culture assumes commercial

culture is mass culture. For him, a key issue is that popular culture is
authentically popular— created by those who find pleasure in the culture
and use it to understand and change their lives. Duncombe distinguished
between popular culture that arises in such an authentic way and
commercial culture that is manufactured to be popular. Duncombe’s book,
then, links underground culture with the notion of the popular; zines are a
form of grassroots popular culture that often exists as a reaction to artificial
and unauthentic commercial cultural forms.
A bit narrower definition of commercial culture, one that is the focus

of the remainder of this essay, may find agreement with a larger number of
scholars when arguing for its exclusion from notions of the popular.
Commercial culture is not as broad but more deeply commercialistic. The
definition here is similar to the definition of “commercialization” offered by
Mosco (1996): a “process that specifically refers to the creation of a
relationship between an audience and an advertiser”. This definition of
commercial culture overlaps with consumer culture, with the latter also
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including shopping activities and the geography of retail space. Commercial
culture, then, refers specifically to advertising forms of mediated culture:
culture designed to sell a product. By this definition, advertisements are
commercial culture. Commercial culture also results when obvious
advertising and promotional influences intrude on non-advertising forms.
Big blockbuster films like Spider-Man (2002) become commercialized
through such techniques as product placement (one Spider-Man scene
features the utility of Dr. Pepper cans for web shooter target practice) and
merchandising tie-ins (such as Spider-Man Toasted Oat cereal and Spider-
Man Pop-Tarts). The television show becomes commercial culture when it
is used to promote advertisers or other entertainment holdings, such as a
2002 Ford-sponsored reality-based program on the WB network using a
Ford ad slogan, “No Boundaries,” as the name of the program. The book
becomes commercial culture when an advertiser pays to have its product
featured prominently in a book.
Scholars have argued that commercial culture and popular culture

offer significant differences and may be in fact mutually exclusive.
Assumptions about what popular culture is often arise out of such
comparisons. For example, although Jib Fowles (1996) in his book,
appropriately titled (for this essay) Advertising and Popular Culture, saw the
two as “allied symbol systems”, much of the book is spent comparing and
contrasting the two forms of communication, arguing that “advertising, while
sharing many attributes with popular culture, is a categorically different sort
of symbolic content”. By highlighting advertising’s self-serving nature, the
spectator’s skeptical gaze, and more contained content forms (the 30-sec
commercial, for instance), Fowles contrasted popular culture as more
pleasure oriented and appropriated more eagerly by audiences.
When other scholars compare commercial culture and popular

culture, they imply these distinctions but concentrate on how commercial
culture has affected and will continue to affect the forms and functions of
popular culture. Even when discussions of popular culture include
advertising, they often do so hesitantly and with the key notion of advertising
intruding on popular culture. The Popular Culture Association, known for its
exploration (and celebration, at times) of popular culture, has a long-
standing Advertising Division. Some presentations in that division may have
indeed argued that advertising is legitimate popular culture. However, in
Advertising and Popular Culture (same title, different book from the
previously discussed Fowles, 1996), which published samples from the
Advertising Division, the editor argued that advertising scholars at the
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Popular Culture Association “highlight advertising’s impact on culture and
society,” implying a distinction from advertising as popular culture (Danna,
1992). Similarly, in her discussion of “popular advertising” as a topic under
the umbrella of the Popular Communication Division of the International
Communication Association, Zelizer (2000) argued that scholars in this
tradition “complicate the meaning of advertising in its popular dimensions”
rather than explore or discuss advertising’s placement in the popular
domain.
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
COURSE PRE-TEST
I. Multiple Choice. Encircle the letter of the correct answer.
1. It connotes a feeling of oneness, an emotional acceptance of a totality

A. Ideology B. Identity
C. Culture D. None of the above
2. Another term used to define an ideology having distortion or concealment.
A. False Perspective B. False Belief
C. False Consciousness D. None of the above
3. A character with snakes on her head which was the villain or antagonist of
Darna.
A. Valentina B. Matilda
C. Grazilda D. None of the above
4. It suggests a particular way of life.
A. Lifestyle B. Culture
C. Race D. None of the above
5. It is process of interaction and integration among different nations.
A. Technology B. Evolution
C. Globalization D. None of the above
6. It is the study of the records of the past.
A. Archeology B. Anthropology
C. Sociology D. None of the above
7. It is defined as the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.
A. Price B. Brand
C. Label D. None of the above
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8. In the new generation, what is considered a basic for development among
children in their formative years?
A. Breastmilk B. Technology
C. Proper Guidance D. None of the above
9. It is closely related to the idea of “mass culture”
A. commercial culture B. food culture
C. religious culture D. None of the above
10. A culture which is widely favored or liked by many.
A. Popular Culture B. Famous Culture
C. Trend D. None of the above
11. Which is not included in the LGBTQ Community?
A. Gays B. Lesbians
C. Women D. None of the above
12. It refers to the individual utterance, individual use of language.
A. Parole B. Pronunciation
C. Paragraph D. None of the above
13. It studies the historical development of a given language
A. synchronic approach B. diachronic approach
C. direct approach D. None of the above
14. Who is the proponent of Marxism?
A. Robert Marx B. Richard Marx
C. Karl Marx D. None of the above
15. What do we mean by “avant-garde”
A. advanced B. progressive
C. Both A and B D. None of the above
86
II. Essay (5 points per item)
Why do you think we have to study Philippine Popular Culture?

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For the past years, how did “foreign culture” affect our culture in the Philippines?
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
CHAPTER 1 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

Try this out!
Fill in the blanks with relevant terms to create a concept map regarding
Popular Culture.
POPULAR CULTURE
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
CHAPTER 1 (POST – ACTIVITY)
Activity #1
As a Filipino, what part of Filipino culture are you interested in the most?
Explain why. Do you think this part of your culture is popular among other Filipinos?
Elaborate. (10 points)
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Activity #2
Create a slideshow/ power point presentation exhibiting Philippine Popular
Culture. Write a caption for each image or slide that you will be including in your
presentation.
89
Chapter Quiz
I. Identification. Write your answers on the space provided. (10 points)
1. It is a systematic body of ideas articulated by a
particular group of people.
2. It refers to a general process of intellectual, spiritual

and aesthetic development.
3. It contains distorted images of reality that an ideology

produces.
4. This refer to the way in which dominant groups in the

society seek to win consent of subordinate groups in
society.
5. It is also called “mass culture”.
6. What part of hegemony can be employed to analyze

different types of conflict across and within popular
culture.
7. He said that “culture” is one of the two or three most

complicated words in the English language.
8. It is a culture that is widely-favored or well-liked by

many people.
9. He is viewed as an epitome of high culture.
10. He developed the concept “HEGEMONY”
II. True or False. Write T if the statement is correct and F if the statement is
wrong on the blank provided. (10 points)
1. Popular culture is defined to be a culture that originates from the people.
2. Louis Althusser developed the concept of hegemony.
3. Popular culture is the opposite of mass culture.
4. It is considered that popular culture is a culture that is left over after we
have decided what is high culture.
5. Pierre Bourdieu calls ideology, the most important conceptual category
in cultural studies.
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Try this out!

Rearrange the following jumbled words to find out the theories to be
discussed in this chapter. (10 points)
1. X M R A K C I S- Insists that all are ultimately political.
2. I L U T C U R M A S L – basically focuses on the analysis of culture
3. L U C T S R I M S A U R T- focused on the study of texts and practices.
4. M E I S F I N M- it placed gender on the academic agenda
5. R E O T Y H R E U Q E – provides a discipline for exploring the relationships

between lesbians, gay men
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1 ESSAY
How is LANGUAGE relevant in Structuralism? (5 points)
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Differentiate and give appropriate examples of the three levels where culture
always exists. (Lived Culture, Recorded Culture and Culture of a Selective
Tradition. (15 points)
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92
Chapter Quiz
I. Write the letter of the correct answer on the blank provided.
1. A theory that emphasizes the “structure of feeling” of specific groups or
classes or whole societies in order to better understand each other’s culture.
A. Feminism B. Post-Modernism
C. Culturalism D. None of the above
2. It implies that to study and understand texts and practices or language
would lead to understanding the meaning of something.
A. Culturalism B. Structuralism
C. Feminism D. None of the above
3. A theory that explores the LGBT community, their relationships and
culture.
A. Structuralism B. Feminism
C. Queer Theory D. None of the above
4. This theory shows the relevance of historical approaches in the study of
culture.
A. Marxism B. Feminism
5. A theoretical position within feminism and a tendency in contemporary
popular culture.
A. Post-feminism B. Culturalism
C. Marxism D. None of the above
6. Theories which responds to women oppression, causes and solutions.
A. Marxism B. Queer Theory
7. It suggests discovering new body of intellectuals.
A. Post-modernism B. Post-feminism
C. Marxism D. none of the above
8. A theory which has a political approach.
A. Feminism B. Marxism
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9. Part of its project is to attack the “naturalness” of gender.
A. Queer B. Feminism
C. Post-feminism D. None of the above
10. This theory enlightens us to break with the paternalism of the ideology
of mass culture.
A. Culturalism B. Queer Theory
C. Feminism D. None of the above
II. Differentiate the four types of FEMINISM.
RADICAL MARXIST LIBERAL DUAL-SYSTEMS

FEMINISM FEMINISM FEMINISM THEORY
III. Matching Type. Write the corresponding letter on the blank provided.
A B
1. way of life A. MARXISM
2. attacking “naturalness” of gender B. FEMINISM
3. aestheticization C. CULTURALISM
4. feudal, capitalist, production D. POST- MODERNISM
5. women’s oppression E. QUEER THEORY
94
NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

Try this out!
Write the correct answer on the blank provided.
WORD BANK
HISTORY KUNDIMAN
AETAS HISPANIZATION
KOMIKS KULAFU
KENKOY PETRA
DALAGANG BUKID GULONG NG PALAD
1. They are considered native inhabitants/ indigenous

people of the country.
2. A comic character who serves as a counterpart of

“Tarzan”.
3. An early popular music in the Philippines which is a love

song.
4. This was the first Filipino comic strip.
5. This refers to the process of being influenced by the

Spanish culture.
6. A Philippine popular culture in literary form.
7. A horse-bodied folklore character.
8. It is the first full-length feature film.
9. It is the study of the records of the past.
10. One of the longest-running show on radio that was also

translated to television.
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1 Research
Research on one Famous “Komiks” character and write about his/her identity or
role in the story.
(Word Format: Times New Roman, font size: 12, Letter, Margin 1”)
Activity #2 ESSAY
How did Rolando M. Gripaldo define Cultural identity in his article? Answer in your
own words. (10 points)
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Chapter Quiz
I. Identification. Write your answer on the blank provided.
_______1. It connotes something positive, admirable and enduring.
_______2. It is defined broadly as the sum total of what a tribe or
group of people produced (material or nonmaterial), is producing, and will probably
be producing in the future.
___________ _3. According to him, popular culture in the Philippines was
created and used by the Spaniards to the native Filipinos via plays and literature
to get the heart of the natives and win it.
_______4. A kind of culture where there is lack of nationalism and
where what is public is viewed in low esteem, without much national pride.
___________ _5. They are also called the “ruling elite”.
_______ _6. It have also been used by government agencies to carry
such developmental messages as the Green Revolution, housing programs, and
family planning.
______ _7. A term which was used to refer to a cultural object that
comes about from the act of symbolization, such as work of art, a tool or a moral
code, etc.
______ _8. A popular magazine which started in 1923.
______ _9. It is a set of values and beliefs that propels an individual
or a group of people into action.
_______10. Who experimented on what we call “Pinoy Rock”?
_____11. A 100-watt radio station.
_____12. The title of the first talking picture in the island which was
made in 1932.
_____13. What do you call the first films shown in the Philippines
which was considered short features.
_____ _____14. It is a blend of the sacred and the profane, a compromise
between acculturation and inculturation.
_____15. A character in “Komiks” which was a combination of a
phantom and a rooster.
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II. Enumeration
1-3 Classification of the social world 4-6 Name 3 characters from the
according to Julian Huxley Philippine folklore
7-10 the former Big Four of Philippine film
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Warm up!
As a consumer, what are the factors that you consider before purchasing
a certain good or service? (10 points)
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1 ESSAY
Why do you think there are more female endorsers for liquor even if there
are more male customers who are consuming it? (10 points)
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Activity #2
Enumerate different brands which are promoting or advertising their
product/s with experience as their product, how? (10 points)
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100
Chapter Quiz
Identification. Write your answer on the space provided.
1. It may also enter into the production process

of other economic sectors and become a
“creative” input in the production of non-cultural
goods
2. It is a notion that intends to conceptualize a

new trend in economic development, in which the
driver is people’s search for identity and
involvement in an increasingly rich society.
3.It is non-reproducible and aimed at being

consumed on the spot and mass-dissemination
and export
4.This civilization has the agricultural feudal

culture.
5. These are areas that have experience as the

primary goal and where artistic creativity is
essential to its production
6. They gain an advantage in the market by

staging and selling memorable experiences that
are enjoyable and personally engaging the
customer.
7. It seeks to give the customers what can be

defined as a mental journey.
8. Areas that have experience as the primary

goal, but where artistic creativity is not essential
9. They represent an existing but previously

unarticulated genre of economic output that have
the potential to distinguish business offerings.
10. Areas that have experience as the primary

goal, but where artistic creativity is not essential
101
II. Enumeration
1-11. Elements of Experience 12-15. Give 4 examples of
“experience”
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

Try this out!
Essay. Answer the following questions.
1. What is Globalization?
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2. How is Globalization related to Popular Culture?
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1
Identify the following.

1. A process of interaction and integration among the people,
companies and governments of different nations.
2. A traditional vintage style of Nigerian fashion.
3. A place in Guangzhou, China where many African businessmen
reside.
4. What does ICT stands for?
5. An article that accounts for the number of K-pop groups that
debuted in specific time periods.
Activity #2
Interpret the following in your words.
THE WORLD IS LIKE A WASHING MACHINE…

a. The world is like a washing machine; it goes round and round.
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b. The world is like a washing machine; after warming up, it turns really really fast.
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c. The world is like a washing machine; in it is a bit of everything.

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104
d. The world is like a washing machine; it turns, but sometimes not as fast as the
others.
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e. The world is like a washing machine; it could stop turning, but it will eventually
begin another wash cycle.
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Try this out!
List down some examples of the culture of the following nations:
Philippines Saudi Arabia China Japan Korea
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1 ESSAY
1. How does global culture affect local culture and vice versa?
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2. How did globalization affect the values of Asian Nations?

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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

Try this out!
JUMBLED LETTERS. Arrange the letters to form different words that
you will be encountering on this chapter.
1. N T E I E N Z
2. L A I O S E A D M E I
3. M P S O D T O I M E N R S
4. A B R D N
5. L G A T D I I
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1 Rsearch
1. Where did the word netizen come from? Explain.
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2. Cite the advantages and disadvantages of the Digital Age.
ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Warm up!
1. As a millennial, to what extent does social media affects you?
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2. If given a chance to choose, would you rather be born in a generation where

life was simple and not so techie or would you still choose to be a millennial? Why?
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NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________
SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________
Activity #1
Conduct an interview with your parent/s or guardian/s regarding the difference of
their lives before and their lives now.
Reminder: Be courteous in asking questions.
111

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DISCLAIMER

This module is intended for STUDENTS OF TARLAC STATE

General Elective 5 – Philippine Popular Culture

VISION Tarlac State University is envisioned to be a premier

MISSION Tarlac State University commits to promote and

Towards this end, TSU shall:

1. Provide high quality instruction trough qualified,

CORE VALUES E - xcellence

ERIN FAYE M. BAUN

ERIN FAYE M. BAUN graduated AB

Ruby Rose P. Vinluan

Ruby Rose P. Vinluan is a graduate of

Course Content/Subject Matter

INSTRUCTION TO THE USER

• Understand the definition of popular culture and the concepts

1.3 POPULAR CULTURE

• We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs.

Popular Press Quality Press

Popular Cinema Art Cinema

Popular Entertainment Art

A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture’. This draws

Authentic Culture Culture Cultural Analysis False

• Demonstrate critical thinking by analysis of the different theories

THEORIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

2.4 GENDER and SEXUALITY

Aestheticization Commodification/ Culturalism Culturalization

• Explain the brief history of Pop Culture in the Philippines.

3.1 History of Popular Culture in the Philippines

1. Definition. A stable definition of "popular culture" in the Philippine context must

3. Identification of Issues. Since popular culture in the Philippines was brought

a) Commodified culture and consumerism, exemplified in the

b) Westernized taste and consciousness, or cultural imperialism

c) The mystification of Philippine social realities and the pacification

6. Identification of purpose. "Popular culture is power," and since it is not created

Popular culture as a form of discourse serves as a potent force for

Artifacts Civilization Cultural Citizenship Cultural

Gripaldo, Rolando (2010,2015). History and Cultural Identity. De La Salle

• Demonstrate a better understanding on the Philippine Pop Culture

Economic development normally carries with its cultural development.

Figure 4.1 Economic Societies.

Table 4.1 Elements of Experience.

4.2 Experience Sector

4.3 EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Experience economy is a notion that intends to conceptualize a new trend

The “cultural sector” is non-reproducible and aimed at being consumed on

Bille and Lorenzen (2008) reached a tentative demarcation of the

1. Creative experience areas (areas that have experience as the

2. Experience areas (areas that have experience as the primary

3. Creative areas (areas where artistic creativity is essential but

Much of the experience economy is composed of mixed products that

Table 4.2 Definitions of art and culture versus experiences

Quality Culture as Arts The good experience

Primarily professionals (peer The consumer

Sector Cultural areas Experience areas

Societal trend Aspect Megatrend

Communication Competition Creative Area Creative

• Briefly explain the effects of globalization to pop culture and vice

The phenomenon of globalization is defined as the "acceleration and

Globalization, propelled by advance in communication and transportation

Media and popular culture serve as primary channels through which we

Through diverse processes, our globalized world is tremendously

Globalization contradicts the very idea that culture is bound to specific

Popular culture functions as a resource in shared meaning making.

5.3 HYBRID TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES: CONVERGE OR DIVERGE