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
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granted.
Parts of the module were lifted or adapted from different sources, then were compiled. All credits and
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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
[email protected]
FAYE M. BAUN gradua
Psychology at Tarlac State University as Cum
Laude. She is taking up her master’s degree in
Guidance and Counseling at
ERIN 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

[email protected]

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 OntoHistorical
Inquiry
Week 6 F. Philippine Modernity and Popular Culture: An OntoHistorical
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 poststructuralists 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.”

2
 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

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

3
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 culture.
Example:
What the culture/popular culture test might
William Shakespeare is now
include is a range of value judgements on a text
seen as the epitome of high
or practice. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
culture, yet as late as the 19th
(1984) argues that cultural distinctions of this century his work was very much
kind are often used to support class distinctions. a part of popular theatre.
Taste is a deeply 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 nondiscriminating 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 The compromise equilibrium
culture of ‘the people’ – it is a terrain of of hegemony can also be
exchange and negotiation between the two: a employed to analyze different
terrain, as already stated, marked by types of conflict within and
resistance and incorporation. The texts and across popular culture
practices of popular culture move within
what 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.
Turner, Graeme (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, (Third Edition).
London: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond (1983). Keywords. London: Fontana.

6
 ATTENTION!!!

Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the

POST
– ACTIVITY on page 89
PRE – ACTIVITY on page 91
GOOD LUCK!!!

7
 CHAPTER 2
THEORIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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 his work Theory of culture - the
alone is formidable. He has made significant study of relationships
between elements in a
contributions to our understanding of cultural
whole way of life.
theory, cultural history, television, the press, 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 is used to describe a
discursive structure that is a cross between a collective cultural unconscious and an
ideology.

8
 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-
today 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
famously said:
of revolutionary theory with the purpose of
‘The philosophers have
changing the world. Marxism insists that all are
only interpreted the
ultimately political. The Marxist approach to world, in various ways;
culture insists that texts and practices must be the point is to change it’
analyzed in relation to their historical conditions of
production (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.
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

9
 (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 ‘culture
the utopian function of religion: to industry’ to designate the products and
keep alive the human desire for a processes of mass culture. The products of
better world beyond the confines of the culture industry, they claim, are marked
the present. (Horkheimer 1978) 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 and economic goals that could be realized within the oppressive and
exploitative framework of capitalist society.

10
 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
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

11
 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,
‘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

12
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
postfeminist 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.
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)

13
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.
Furthermore, it is not just that ‘gender is
“One is not born a woman, one not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also
becomes one; but further, one is the discursive/cultural means by which sexed
not born female, one becomes nature or a natural sex’ is produced and
female; but even more established as “pre-discursive”, prior to culture, a
radically, one can if one politically neutral surface on which culture acts.
chooses, become neither female In this way, the internal stability and binary
nor male, woman nor man”. frame for sex is Butler explains, ‘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

14
 (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 new reality: ‘a realm of
a culture in which claims of ‘incorporation’ apparent unity and apparent
or ‘co-optation’ make no sense, as there is freedom was constructed within
no longer a critical space from which to be
culture in which the
incorporated or co-opted. The thorough
antagonistic relations of
‘culturalization’ or
existence were supposed to be
‘aestheticization’ of everyday
stabilized and pacified. Culture
life is what marks postmodernism off from
affirms and conceals the new
previous socio-cultural moments.
Affirmative culture is a realm we may enter conditions of 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.
KEYWORDS
Aestheticization Commodification/ Culturalism Culturalization
Commercialization
Culture Industry Diachronic Feminism Gender
Approach
Langue Feminism Lived Culture Marxism
Parole Post Feminism Post Modernism Queer Theory
Recorded Culture Selective Tradition Sexuality Structuralism
Structure of Synchronic
Feeling 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.

15
 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.
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.

16
 ATTENTION!!!

Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the

POST
– ACTIVITY on page 92
PRE – ACTIVITY on page 95
GOOD LUCK!!!

CHAPTER 3 PHILIPPINE MODERNITY AND POPULAR CULTURE: AN

ONTOHISTORICAL INQUIRY

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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

17
'ladinos', as they became instrumental "in bringing into the vernacular, literary
forms that were to be vehicles for the "pacification" of the natives".

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 korido ensured the acceptance and
of 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
he used prayers such as the 'Aba,
work its way as propaganda, they
Ginoong Maria' and 'Ama Namin' in a
soon used the Spanish weapon
sort of parody to strike against the
against them. In the 19th century,
abusive Spanish Friars.
through the Propaganda Movement,
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."

18
 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."

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?
5. Definition of the popular writer. Considering the size of his audience, the
popular writer is definitely a significant intellectual. Since the Pilipino writer

19
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.

KEYWORDS
Artifacts Civilization Cultural Citizenship Cultural
Identity
Damaged Culture Film Folk Culture High Culture
Hollywood Komiks Literature Low Culture

20
 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!!!
Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the
POST – ACTIVITY on page 96 PRE – ACTIVITY on page 99 GOOD
LUCK!!!

CHAPTER 4 PHILIPPINE POP CULTURE AND EXPERIENCE

ECONOMY

21
 LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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.

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.

22
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 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”.

23
 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
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
evaluation
The good experience
Culture as Arts Quality evaluated by:
Quality evaluated by: The consumer
Primarily professionals (peer Subjective
review)
Partially objective

24
 Sector Cultural areas Experience areas

Societal trend
Megatrend
Aspect Linked to the
Linked to societal values and market, 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).

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.creativeheritage.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>

25
 ATTENTION!!!

Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the

POST – ACTIVITY on page 100

PRE – ACTIVITY on page 103

GOOD LUCK!!!

CHAPTER 5 Globalization of Popular Culture

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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.

26
 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 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, &

27
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.

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
massmediated 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

28
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.

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

29
 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/upmassets/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!!!

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PRE – ACTIVITY on page 106

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30
 CHAPTER 6 Local Popular Culture and Global Popular Culture

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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.
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

31
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.

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.

32
 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
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 wellordered 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.

33
 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
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.

34
 Regionally produced
popular culture is often funded Examples:
by transnational capital and Japanese cartoons (Pokemon, Hello Kitty)
targets multiple Computer games (Super Mario Bros., Dance
audiences. Japanese Dance Revolution)
popular culture was the most Horror movies (Ringu, remade in the United
widely consumed during the States as The Ring),
1980s and 1990s, although its Chinese martial arts films (Hero, Crouching
popularization was hindered in Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
some countries by anti- Famous Stars (Jet Li, Jackie Chan)
Japanese sentiment
stemming from the country’s
colonial past. More recently,
South Korean pop songs and
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
allfemale 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.

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,

35
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.”
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

36
 Cultural Services Global Culture Hamburgerization Internat
Islam Local Culture Modernization Multicultural
Traditions Values Westernization Westoxification
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/upmassets/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-
acman-scw:210986&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF>

ATTENTION!!!

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POST – ACTIVITY on page 107

PRE – ACTIVITY on page 108

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37
 CHAPTER 7
Pop Culture in the Digital Age

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The student must be able to:

• 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 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

38
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!!!

Read the following article:

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

39
 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:
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>

Patti, Emmanuela (2020). Popular Culture in the Digital Age. Retrieved from <
https://www.academia.edu/42309436/POPULAR_CULTURE_IN_THE_DIGITA
L_ AGE>

ATTENTION!!!
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POST – ACTIVITY on page 109 PRE – ACTIVITY on page 110

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CHAPTER 8
Commercial Culture

40
 LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

The student must be able to:

• 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
According to the Yahoo-Nielsen Survey
the outcome? of 2013, the top three sources of media
With these media vehicles, consumption in the Philippines come
the so-called the fourth estate of from the television, the radio, and the
the government, one can continually rising internet usage.
actually deduce that
watching favorite
shows on the television, listening to radio programs, or even surfing the 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 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,

41
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 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 art"
term referring to the and the "rise of infotainment" to attract advertisers to
promotion of an advertise in commercial breaks during television or
advertisement in a very radio shows, or popping-up in the websites, cross-
subtle way inside another promotion has been a wide practice and people can
program, or the like. actually sense it but not look it straight in the eye.
Imagine watching a movie and seeing a product
endorsement of the

42
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.
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,

43
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 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!!!
Read the following article:

44
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 Manufacture
Mass Media Media Conglomerates Media Vehicles Popular
Advertising
Profit Public Opinion Technology Television
Wealth Worldwide Web

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:

45
Culture and Globalization, 2017. LEVIN Institute. Pages 2-8. Retrieved from
<http://www.globalization101.org>
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>

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!!!

Before you go to the next page, PLEASE ANSWER the

POST – ACTIVITY on page 111

GOOD LUCK!!!

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.

46
 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.

47
 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.
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,

48
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
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.

49
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 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

50
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
nationstates that were once colonies—are still struggling to evolve a cultural
identity 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

51
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 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-
mediumscale 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

52
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
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
crosspurposes 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

53
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.

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).

54
 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.
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

55
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.
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

56
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
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)

57
and the Voice of America. It was on these hidden radio sets that the underground
newspapers depended heavily for information on the war.
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
"popular," however, since it was in English, and therefore, not available to the

58
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,
pseudosophisticated 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
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,

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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.
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

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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 Kfashion 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.

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.

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 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 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

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 video. Through cursors and a song, people can interact with societies around the
globe.
he 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 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.

The world is like a washing machine: in it is a bit of everything.

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 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 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

65
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 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.

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rld 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, wayabove, 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
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

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 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 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 topdown 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,

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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, 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

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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 “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).

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 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.
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 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,

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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
wellthought and coordinated strategy of communication meant to provide a
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

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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 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.

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 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 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 SpiderMan 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.

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 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 longstanding 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 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.

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 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
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

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 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

NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________

SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

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 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.

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

CHAPTER 2 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

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 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: __________

CHAPTER 2 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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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 ________________________________________________________________
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
C. Culturalism D. None of the above
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
C. Culturalism D. None of the above
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
C. Culturalism D. None of the above

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-
FEMINISM FEMINISM FEMINISM SYSTEMS
THEORY

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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

NAME: ________________________________________ DATE: ___________

SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

CHAPTER 3 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

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

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 1. They are considered native inhabitants/ indigenous
people of the country.
2
“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.
NAME:
________________________________________ DATE:
___________ SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE:
__________

CHAPTER 3 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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.

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 _____ _____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.

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: __________

CHAPTER 4 (PRE – ACTIVITY) 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: __________

CHAPTER 4 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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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________________________________________________________________
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

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II. Enumeration
1-11. Elements of Experience 12-15. Give 4 examples of
“experience”

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

CHAPTER 5 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

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

CHAPTER 5 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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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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: __________

CHAPTER 6 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

Try this out!

List down some examples of the culture of the following nations:

Philippines Saudi China Japan Korea

Arabia

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SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE:
__________

CHAPTER 6 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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: __________

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 NAME: ________________________________________ DATE:
___________

CHAPTER 7 (PRE – ACTIVITY)

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

SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE:

__________

CHAPTER 7 (POST – ACTIVITY)

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: __________

CHAPTER 8 (PRE – ACTIVITY) 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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SECTION: _____________________________________ SCORE: __________

CHAPTER 8 (POST – ACTIVITY)

Activity #1
Conduct an interview with your parent/s or guardian/s regarding the difference of
their lives before and their lives now.

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 NAME: ________________________________________ DATE:
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Reminder: Be courteous in asking questions.

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