PPOP CULTURE: PRELIMS

• Popular Culture is a culture that is extensively favored by many people and tends to reflect the interests of wide audiences or intentionally target their preferences
• Popular Culture is a fusion of ideas, things, actions, and circumstances that may affect changes in the belief, personality, and preference of an individual
• Popular Culture is prevalent and well-known, dictating what will be the trend for a certain period of time and is considered a residue of high culture, highlighting it as the culture of the masses, particularly the working class
• Popular Culture is influenced by mass consumption and commercialization, offering an "escape" to ordinary people by providing amusement to survive everyday life and has a didactic orientation or tendency to uplift morality
• Popular Culture is considered by some scholars to be a medium for "Americanization"
• Characteristics of Popular Culture:

  • Well-liked by people
  • Inferior kinds of work
  • Deliberately intended to win the favor of the people
  • Made by the people for themselves
• Popular Culture is made to be commercialized, transgressive in its categories, disseminated with the use of technology, and subjected to the notion of sadomasochism
• Popular Culture is disseminated through technology, reaching out to as many people as possible, fulfilling its functions and characteristics
• Popular Culture may subject people to masochism, as individuals may exchange a portion of their comfort and resources to avail something popular for a certain period of time
• Popular Culture serves as an outlet for expressing feelings, coping with problems, realizing life lessons, and simplifying concepts and issues in society
• Examples of Popular Culture:

  • Music: becomes popular when many people can relate to it or connect with it, serving as an expression of feelings
  • Memes: simplify complicated social issues to make them easier to understand, creating a space for common people to join the discourse about societal issues
  • Advertisements: tell stories or campaigns, aiming to remind people to be strong in difficult times, helping them cope with life's hardships
  • Television Game Shows/Reality Shows: entertain people of all classes, catering to various audiences to relate to, showing the most well-known function of Popular Culture
• Culture is the complex whole of a society, including language, beliefs, values, customs, laws, norms, traditions, etc.
• Culture generally refers to patterns of human activity and symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance
• Culture is passed along by communication/socialization from one generation to another
• Culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret and generate behavior (James Spradley, Anthropologist)
• Key characteristics of culture:

  • Culture is learned directly, through observation, experience, watching documentaries, and reading books
  • Culture is shared by a group of people who have common values, beliefs, traditions, literature, history, language, and mannerisms
  • Culture is dynamic, fluid, and changes all the time, adapting to the changing environment
  • Culture is integrated/systemic, with interrelated parts that create a whole, where changes in one part affect others
  • Culture is symbolic, with humans creating meaning between symbols and what they represent
• Iceberg Model of Culture by Edward Hall:

  • Surface Culture: explicit manifestations like food, arts, music, literature, fashion, language, greetings, festivals
  • Deep Culture: implicit manifestations like communication styles, manners, values, respect for authority
• Cultural Determinism:

  • Culture determines the nature of people based on their ideas, meanings, and values
  • Human behavior is influenced by cultural factors rather than biological
• Cultural relativism:

  • Different cultural groups think, feel, and act differently
  • Beliefs and practices should be understood based on a person's own culture
• Cultural ethnocentrism:

  • Judging another culture through the lens of your own culture
  • Can lead to negative judgments and misunderstandings
• Basic elements of culture:

  • Language: a structured system of communication passed down through generations
  • Norms: rules of behavior patterns or traits typical of a social group
  • Beliefs: principles, ideas, convictions, and religious faith accepted as true or good
  • Symbols: used for representation, like language, signs, numbers, actions, clothing
  • Values: moral principles and beliefs guiding human behavior
  • Cognitive elements: dealing with management of difficult times or natural calamities, learned and taught by parents