Module 3

Popular Culture and the Media

This module will introduce you to the different popular culture existing in the media
as of the moment, including its evolution through time and the process of creating popular
culture and the media. I hope you will learn something from this module in order for you
to be aware and informative about the Philippine Television and the emerging trends in
the media.

Desired Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this unit, the student will be able to:

1. Integrate the relationship between popular culture and media;
2. Identify and differentiate between the different types of Media (Traditional/ Legacy
and New Media);
3. Discuss media evolution as the backdrop of popular culture and;
4. Reflect on the evolving rope of the people in the crafting of mass media and pop
culture.

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.

What is its overall tone?

______________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
What messages does it seem to be promoting, either implicitly or explicitly?
______________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Next, find a website that also deals with popular culture and ask yourself the
same questions. Are there differences between the traditional media’s and the new
media’s approach to popular culture?
______________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Do they focus on the same subjects? Do they take similar attitudes? Why or why
not?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
I. The Link Between Mass Media and Popular Culture
THE ROLE OF MASS MEDIA IN SOCIETY
More than one hundred years ago, John Dewey wrote in Democracy and
Education that society is not only supported by various forms of communication but also
enveloped in communication. Dewey reiterated what philosophers and scholars had
noted for centuries: small groups, larger communities and vast institutions — all the things
that make up a society — function in relation to how communication flows within and
between groups.
There are different forms of communication. At the broadest level, communication
is an exchange of meaning between people using symbols. The most common symbols
we use are verbal and written words, but there are also many forms of nonverbal
communication such as American Sign Language. What sign language, verbal
communication and written communication have in common is the use of abstract
symbols to convey meaning. Whether you say “thank you” in face-to-face communication,
send someone a card with the words “thank you” written on it, or use nonverbal cues to
express thanks, the meaning is the same.
Interpersonal communication generally refers to the exchange of meaning
between two or more people on a personal, often one-on-one, level. Interpersonal
communication can be verbal or nonverbal. Most often, it happens in face-to-face
settings. It differs from mass communication, which involves sharing meaning through
symbolic messages to a wide audience from one source to many receivers.
Sometimes, particularly in computer-mediated communication, messages
conveyed using computers, it can be difficult to tell the difference between interpersonal
communication and mass communication because individuals can send messages
intended only for other individuals that might quickly reach large numbers of people.
Social media platforms are often structured in ways that allow interpersonal messages to
“go viral” and become mass messages whether the original sender intended to address
a mass audience or not.
It is not the type of message that determines interpersonal or mass
communication. It is the way the message is distributed and the relationships between
sender and receiver(s).
This text will continue to grapple with the overlap of interpersonal communication
and mass communication structures on networked communication platforms, but first,
another form of communication commonly studied in academic settings should be
introduced.
Organizational communication is the symbolic exchange of messages carrying
specific meaning for members belonging to formal organizations. In practical terms, it is
the internal communication that helps governments, businesses, schools and hospitals
to run.
 Communication structure refers to a combination of information and
communication technologies (ICTs), guidelines for using those technologies, and
professional workers dedicated to managing information and messages. In the mass
communication field, communication structures are more than computers and
transmission networks. The guidelines for using networks to create and distribute
messages for mass consumption are a matter of corporate policy as well as law.
It has been noted that a society is made up of small groups, larger communities,
and vast institutions. A more complete definition of the term comes from the field of
sociology. A society is a very large group of people organized into institutions held
together over time through formalized relationships. Nations, for example, are made up
of formal institutions organized by law. Governments of different size, economic
institutions, educational institutions and others all come together to form a society.
By comparison, culture — the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of groups large
and small — is not necessarily formalized. Culture is necessary for enjoying and making
sense of the human experience, but there are few formalized rules governing culture.
Mass communication influences both society and culture. Different societies have
different media systems, and the way they are set up by law influences how the society
works. Different forms of communication, including messages in the mass media, give
shape and structure to society. Additionally, mass media outlets can spread cultural
knowledge and artistic works around the globe. People exercise cultural preferences
when it comes to consuming media, but mass media corporations often decide which
stories to tell and which to promote, particularly when it comes to forms of mass media
that are costly to produce such as major motion pictures, major video game releases and
global news products.
More than any other, the field of mass communication transmits culture. At the
same time, it helps institutional society try to understand itself and whether its structures
are working.

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.

II. History and evolution of Media (Traditional/Legacy and New Media)

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing
press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the same.
The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it
much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also
made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance
of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in massive cultural movements like the
European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In 1810, another German
printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he essentially
hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed
media. In 1800, a hand-operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per
hour; Koenig’s machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing
presses could publish 3,000 pages an hour.)
This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper.
The newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the
19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through gossip and word
of mouth. These Americans were living in unfamiliar territory, and newspapers and other
media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution
meant that some people had more leisure time and more money, and media helped
them figure out how to spend both. Media theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that
newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the
country as part of one unified community (Anderson, 1991).
In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat from the rise of
penny papers, which were low-priced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more
sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over the
dry political news of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated
audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap
prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press can be seen as the
forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass
media—radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than
telephones and widely available by the 1920s, had the unprecedented ability of allowing
huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In 1924, Calvin
Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people. Radio was a boon
for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early
advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity
for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless
audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested,
approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs & Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio
also meant that the medium was able to downplay regional differences and encourage a
unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and
defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-
made, exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum
cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year
round (Mintz, 2007).” This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also
helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s (Library of Congress). The
consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but when the
Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of
production helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being
produced than could be sold.
The post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by
the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946,
about 17,000 televisions existed in the United States; within 7 years, two-thirds of
American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross national
product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the American home
became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a television, the typical U.S.
household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed to the
nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs & Burke, 2005). Broadcast television
was the dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more
than 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans.
Some social critics argued that television was fostering a homogenous, conformist
culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life looked like. But television
also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s
first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters
helped intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.
Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold on the
American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having
to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily
archived, and it allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had
purchased a magazine, he or she could read it whenever and wherever. Broadcast
media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule, which allowed it to both
provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness. Until the advent of digital video
recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to pause and rewind a live television
broadcast.
The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with
the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had a
limited number of channels to choose from—one reason for the charges of homogeneity.
In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing. By
2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks to the
spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices,
including channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, classic
films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated
by the three large networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster
competition by deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts
that left most of the control of the broadcast spectrum in the hands of a few large
corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened
regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market
(up from 25 percent in 1982).

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

1. Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1991).

Bilton, Jim. “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation,
January/February 2007.

Briggs and Burke, Social History of the Media.

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the
Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Kay, Alan. “The Infobahn Is Not the Answer,” Wired, May 1994.

Library of Congress, “Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption,”

Coolidge-Consumerism
Collection, http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/inradio.html.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1964).

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/