Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PhilPopCulture Module 3
PhilPopCulture Module 3
Learning Activities:
Before you start reading and learning the lesson proper, kindly answer first the
questions below.
Find a popular newspaper or magazine that discusses popular culture.
Look through it to determine what pop culture movements, programs, or people it
seems to be covering.
Cultural Production
There is another way of looking at the mass media that needs to be mentioned
after looking in some depth at the structural changes going on in and around the field of
mass communication. Mass media channels are also huge engines of cultural production.
That is, they make the entertainment that helps us define who we are as large and small
groups of people.
To quote from Dead Poets Society: “We read and write poetry because we are
members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law,
business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry,
beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” If you replace “reading and
writing poetry” with “creating culture,” you get a sense of the importance of cultural
production. We can define culture as a collection of our knowledge, beliefs and practices.
In practice, culture it how we express ourselves and enjoy life’s experiences.
In media, there are three main types of cultural works, those associated with “high”
culture, popular culture and folk culture. (Some scholars discuss “low” culture, but it is
argued here that “low culture” is just another way of describing the low end of pop culture.)
High culture is arguably the best cultural material a society has to offer. Economic
class often comes into play in defining what is “high culture” and what is not. Pop culture
is the vast array of cultural products that appeal to the masses.
Folk culture refers to cultural products borne out of everyday life identifiable
because they usually have practical uses as well as artistic value. It is often associated
with prehistoric cultures, but that is because the folk culture, pop culture and high culture
of prehistoric peoples were often one and the same. Their best art may also have been
an everyday object like a bowl or a basket or a doll or a mask. Don’t confuse prehistoric
art with modern folk art.
Modern folk art has the specific quality of trying to capture what is both beautiful
and useful in everyday life. Folk music tends to rely on “traditional” sounds and
instruments. Topically, it focuses on the value of everyday existence. Folk music is often
built around narratives that carry morals much the same way fairy tales do. Fairy tales
are probably the best example of folk literature.
So much of the interpretation and the value of cultural production is culturally
relative. This means that an object or work’s value is determined by perceptions of people
in different cultural groups.
In modern society, mass media often drive our perceptions. It is important to
recognize that different cultures have different moral values and to acknowledge that
some practices should be universally abhorred and stopped, even if they are partially or
wholly accepted in other cultures.
The relationship between culture and mass media is complex; it is difficult to
distinguish modern culture from how it appears in the various mass media. Culture in the
developed world is spread through mass media channels. Just as society forms and is
formed in part by messages in the mass media, so it goes with culture. Cultural products
and their popularity can influence which media channels people prefer. Conversely,
changes in media and ICTs can lead to changes in how we produce culture.
III. How the Evolution of Media shifted the power of the people in crafting mass
media
New media technologies both spring from and cause social changes. For this
reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes and effects.
Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular
because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies?
Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine,
electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant
effects on American culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every
crucial invention came with “a change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the
way people thought about time because work and play were no longer dependent on the
daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance; the
Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.
The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph,
patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph,
communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages; it didn’t
matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly, information from
distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as telegraph lines began to stretch
across the globe, making their own kind of World Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph
acted as the precursor to much of the technology that followed, including the telephone,
radio, television, and Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing
nearly instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times
described it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given
to the sphere of human activity.”
Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the
development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension
of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla,
were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is
recognized as the developer of the first practical wireless radio system. Many people were
fascinated by this new invention. Early radio was used for military communication, but
soon the technology entered the home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired
hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news
outlets, retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—
including the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926,
they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had risen to
30 percent.
In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s
made significant advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of
photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and television.
As with wireless technology, several inventors independently created a form of
photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph Niépce and
Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United States,
George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, anticipating that Americans
would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes as they had with
the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century,
with the first U.S. projection-hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood
had already created its first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s,
Americans were watching color films with full sound, including Gone With the Wind and
The Wizard of Oz.
Television—which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses,
transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images—existed
before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In 1947, there were
178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later, 15 million were made.
Radio, cinema, and live theater declined because the new medium allowed viewers to be
entertained with sound and moving pictures in their homes. In the United States,
competing commercial stations (including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC)
meant that commercial-driven programming dominated. In Great Britain, the government
managed broadcasting through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was
driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the U.S. system, the
BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired.
However, U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the
beginning of 1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United States, but
only 4.8 million in all of Europe. Important national events, broadcast live for the first time,
were an impetus for consumers to buy sets so they could witness the spectacle; both
England and Japan saw a boom in sales before important royal weddings in the 1950s.
In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer was still a dream; huge
mainframes were required to run a basic operating system. In 1969, management
consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological innovation would be
an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way people lived just as thoroughly
as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than a television set
and be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate
access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.”
Although Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was
prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet would
have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random
access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to
the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of
thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many
different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film, recording,
radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of
increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force
that’s affecting media today.
ASSESSMENT
Choose two different types of mass communication—radio shows, television broadcasts,
Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on—from two different kinds of media.
Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we see, hear,
or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Then, answer the following
questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.
1. To which of the four roles media plays in society do your selections correspond?
Why did the creators of these particular messages present them in these
particular ways and in these particular mediums?
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
2. What events have shaped the adoption of the two kinds of media you selected?
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
3. How have technological transitions shaped the industries involved in the two
kinds of media you have selected?
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
SUGGESTED READINGS
Bilton, Jim. “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation,
January/February 2007.
Kay, Alan. “The Infobahn Is Not the Answer,” Wired, May 1994.
Mintz, Steven “The Jazz Age: The American 1920s: The Formation of Modern American
Mass Culture,” Digital History,
2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?hhid=454.
Ramsey, Doug. “UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans
Consume” UC San Diego News Center, December 9,
2009, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/12-09Information.asp.
State of the Media, project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media
2004, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/.
Wallace, David Foster “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly
Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little Brown, 1997).
https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/1-3-the-evolution-of-media/
https://press.rebus.community/mscy/chapter/chapter-1/