PPC

POPULAR CULTURE THROUGH THEORETICAL LENS

After going through this chapter, students are expected to:

1. Define and comprehend the concepts of Semiotics and Uses, Gratifications Theory, Culture Industry and Agenda Setting Theory

2. Integrate Semiotics and Gratifications Theory within the construct of Philippine Pop Culture

3.Understand and discuss critically the theoretical approaches applied to Philippine popular culture.

4. Evaluate Philippine popular culture from differing viewpoints and perspectives.

5. Analyze the strengths and flaws of each stance in preserving Filipino culture to promote

Popular culture studies are the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Academic discussions on popular culture started as soon as contemporary mass society formed itself and the views on popular culture that were developed then still influence contemporary popular culture studies.

Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse mediums as comic books, television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).

Sociological Definition of Popular Culture

Popular culture (or "pop culture") refers in general to the traditions and material culture of a particular society. In the modern West, pop culture refers to cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, dance, film, cyberculture, television, and radio that are consumed by the majority of a society's population. Popular culture is those types of media that have mass accessibility and appeal. The term "popular culture" was coined in the mid-19th century, and it referred to the cultural traditions of the people, in contrast to the "official culture" of the state or governing classes. In broad use today, it is defined in qualitative terms—pop culture is often considered a more superficial or lesser type of artistic expression.

Scholars trace the origins of the rise of popular culture to the creation of the middle class generated by the Industrial Revolution. People who were configured into working classes and moved into urban environments far from their traditional farming life began creating their own culture to share with their co-workers, as a part of separating from their parents and bosses. After the end of World War II, innovations in mass media led to significant cultural and social changes in the west. At the same time, capitalism, specifically the need to generate profits, took on the role of marketing: newly invented goods were being marketed to different classes. The meaning of popular culture then began to merge with that of mass culture, consumer culture, image culture, media culture, and culture created by manufacturers for mass consumption.

Different Definitions of Popular Culture

In his wildly successful textbook "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture" (now in its 8th edition), British media specialist John Storey offers six different definitions of popular culture.

Popular culture is simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people: it has no negative connotations.

Popular culture is whatever is left after you've identified what "high culture" is: in this definition, pop culture is considered inferior, and it functions as a marker of status and class.

Pop culture can be defined as commercial objects that are produced for mass consumption by non-discriminating consumers. In this definition, popular culture is a tool used by the elites to suppress or take advantage of the masses.

Popular culture is folk culture, something that arises from the people rather than imposed upon them: pop culture is authentic (created by the people) as opposed to commercial (thrust upon them by commercial enterprises).

Pop culture is negotiated: partly imposed on by the dominant classes, and partly resisted or changed by the subordinate classes. Dominants can create culture but the subordinates decide what they keep or discard.

The last definition of pop culture discussed by Storey is that in the postmodern world, in today's world, the distinction between "authentic" versus "commercial" is blurred. In pop culture today, users are free to embrace some manufactured content, alter it for their own use, or reject it entirely and create their own.

All six of Storey's definitions are still in use, but they seem to change depending on the context. Since the turn of the 21st century, mass media—the way pop culture is delivered—has changed so dramatically that scholars are finding it difficult to establish how they function. As recently as 2000, "mass media" meant only print (newspapers and books), broadcast (televisions and radio), and cinema (movies and documentaries). Today, it embraces an enormous variety of social media and forms. To a large degree, popular culture is today something established by niche users. What is "mass communication" moving forward? Commercial products such as music are considered popular even when the audience is tiny, in comparison to such pop icons as Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. The presence of social media means consumers can speak directly to producers—and are producers themselves, turning the concept of pop culture on its head. So, in a sense, popular culture has gone back to its simplest meaning: It is what a lot of people like. (Crossman, 2019)

Theory and What is it for?

A theory is a method we use to give us understanding. One of the major purposes of a theory is to provide an answer to the question ‘why?’. Asking, ‘why?’, to increase your knowledge of a subject area and realign your thoughts and opinions is an essential skill for anybody who wants to learn and develop. ‘Why’ is one of the very first questions that children ask: “Can you get ready for bed now?” … “Oh why?”

“Why is snow cold?” “Why do I have to go to school tomorrow?” “Why is the sky blue?”… Questions like these, from children, can be endless. Often finding or providing suitable explanations can be exhausting and frustrating – perhaps we resort to saying, “Well it just is!” At the basis of such questions however, are a child’s first attempts to understand the world around them, and develop their own theories of why things are the way they are. Defining ‘theory’, therefore, has to take into account the ‘why?’ question, but a theory is deeper than that. The points below go some way to helping with a definition. A theory is an attempt to explain why and so to provide understanding. A theory is not just ‘any’ explanation - a theory comes into being when a series of ideas come to be held and accepted by a wider community of people. A theory is not necessarily factually based – how we understand and provide explanations arises from our cultural background and how we view the world.

Understanding Theory

Although there are no hard and fast rules, modern theory is usually developed through a series of steps, by academics and scientists. It is important to understand that the steps to theory development, as listed on this page, are generally thought of as being sequential – one step follows the last. In reality there is often more than one of these processes being engaged in at any one time.

Observation and Description

Hypothesis – The Research Question

Reading and Placing in Context

Research

Publication

Social Understanding

TYPES OF CULTURAL THEORIES

1. Structural Functionalism, or simply functionalism, is "a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability". This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole, and believes that society has evolved like organisms. This approach looks at both social structure and social functions. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions. A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, presents these parts of society as "organs" that work toward the proper functioning of the "body" as a whole. In the most basic terms, it simply emphasizes "the effort to impute, as rigorously as possible, to each feature, custom, or practice, its effect on the functioning of a supposedly stable, cohesive system". For Talcott Parsons, "structural-functionalism" came to describe a particular stage in the methodological development of social science, rather than a specific school of thought.

2. Critical Theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture to reveal and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychology, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.

Specifically, Critical Theory (capitalized) is a school of thought practiced by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." Although a product of modernism, and although many of the progenitors of Critical Theory were skeptical of postmodernism, Critical Theory is one of the major components of both modern and postmodern thought, and is widely applied in the humanities and social sciences today.

In addition to its roots in the first-generation Frankfurt School, critical theory has also been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. Additionally, second-generation Frankfurt School scholars have been influential, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social "base and superstructure" is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much contemporary critical theory.

3. Structuralism - In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.

4. Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, the postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization. Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines, deconstruction and post-structuralism. Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

5. Practice Theory (or praxeology, theory of social practices) is a body of social theory within anthropology and sociology that explains society and culture as the result of structure and individual agency. Practice theory emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Practice theory developed in reaction to the Structuralist school of thought, developed by social scientists such Claude Lévi-Strauss who saw human behavior and organization systems as products of innate universal structures that reflect the mental structures of humans. Structuralist theory asserted that these structures governed all human societies. Practice theory is also built on the concept of agency. For practice theorists, the individual agent is an active participant in the formation and reproduction of their social world.

6. Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science) that uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture. Cross-cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a sample of cases.Unlike comparative studies, which examines similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between the traits in question.These studies are surveys of ethnographic data. Cross-cultural studies are applied widely in the social sciences, particularly in cultural anthropology and psychology.

7. Political Economy is the study of how economic and political (e.g. law, institutions, government) systems are linked. Political economy studies macroeconomic phenomena such as growth, distribution, inequality, and trade, and how these phenomena are shaped by institutions, laws, and political behaviour. Originating in the 16th century, it is the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Political economy in its modern form is considered an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theory from both political science and modern economics. Political economy originated within 16th century western moral philosophy, with theoretical works exploring the administration of states' wealth; "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word οἰκονομία; household management. The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781).

In the late 19th century, the term "economics" gradually began to replace the term "political economy" with the rise of mathematical modeling coinciding with the publication of an influential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming "the recognised name of a science". Citation measurement metrics from Google Ngram Viewer indicate that use of the term "economics" began to overshadow "political economy" around roughly 1910, becoming the preferred term for the discipline by 1920.Today, the term "economics" usually refers to the narrow study of the economy absent other political and social considerations while the term "political economy" represents a distinct and competing approach.

TRADITIONAL THEORIES OF POPULAR CULTURE

1. The theory of mass society - Mass society formed itself during the 19th-century industrialization process through the division of labor, the large-scale industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and international communication system and the growth of mass political movements. The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by anti-capitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of industrialized society. As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset, T.S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass culture.

2. The theory of culture industry - Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates.

3. The theory of progressive evolution - A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people.

RECURRING ISSUES IN POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES

1. The interactions between popular and legitimized culture

The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society. It is hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix. Among the first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs