Pop COOLture

Communicating Popular Culture

The term Popular culture also known as pop culture is the entirety of ideas, images, perspectives and other phenomena withing a given culture heavily influenced by the mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the lives of the people in the society. The most common pop culture categories are: entertainment (movies, music, television, games), sports, news (as in people/places in news), politics, fashion/clothes, technology, and slang. Popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics.

According to some definitions, popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and the dumbed down thing in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, or corrupt.

In his book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey offers six different definitions of popular culture.

In one definition, Storey describes mass or popular culture as "a hopelessly commercial culture [that is] mass-produced for mass consumption [by] a mass of non-discriminating consumers.” He further states that popular culture is “formulaic [and] manipulative,” not unlike how he views the process of advertising.

A product or brand has to be “sold” to an audience before it can be entrenched in mass or popular culture; by bombarding society with it, it then finds its place in popular culture.

An example given by Storey which I think is a good one is, Britney Spear; her road to stardom and place in popular culture were based on marketing strategies to build look along with her fan base. As a result, she generated millions of fans, her songs were played frequently on numerous radio stations, and she went on to sell out concerts and garner the public's fascination through her meltdown. Like the creation of Britney Spears, pop culture almost always depends on mass production for mass consumption because we rely on mass media to get our information and shape our interests.

A liter of Light for the Aetas

A. PROJECT MARKETING
B. PROJECT IMPACT
PROJECT: Pepsi glows Aeta village in Tarlac

It is long time ago, 20 years to be exact, the Aetas of Sitio Tarukan in Capas, Tarlac spent their nights in darkness. Then one day, their darkness became a new beginning, there was light in their streets and homes and that is because of Liter of Light, a humanitarian project of the MyShelter Foundation and Pepsi Philippines. Here is a picture of the people who benefited from the project. I give credit to the owner of the picture and article which I posted in this blog. 

Based on the Philippine Star, The Tarukan lighting project is a gesture of gratitude for the tribe’s hospitality toward actor-singer and Pepsi brand ambassador Daniel Padilla who went there for a location shooting of his movie “Crazy Beautiful You.”

The one-day project was completed last June 6 with more than 50 volunteers deployed by Pepsi and Star Cinema to install 100 solar house lights and 40 street lamps in the village, benefitting more than 400 Aeta families. The volunteers also taught young Aetas how to make their own solar-light box – a simple do-it-yourself lighting system that does not need electricity.

Sitio Tarukan is a zero-powered zone in Capas, Tarlac located about 120 kilometers north of Manila.

Pepsi Philippines Inc. is a Philippines-based company engaged in the bottling and distribution of PepsiCo beverages in the Philippines since 1989. It is the pioneering sponsor of MyShelter Foundation’s Liter of Light project. The project, launched in 2011, provides sustainable off-grid lighting solutions using plastic soda bottles.

The original “day light” is a plastic bottle filled with bleach and water that refracts and magnifies solar energy through solar panels and a simple circuit to power an LED light inserted into the bottle. This simple technology is able to provide up to 10 hours of lighting at night, and can last up to four years.

Furthermore, in their Facebook page, A Liter of Light (Isang Litrong Liwanag), it is explained that MyShelter Foundation’s latest venture, is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly solar bottle bulb to disprivileged communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), The Solar Bottle Bulb is a device based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.

A Liter of Light is a program inspired by many innovations from around the world. Many cultures have used glass bottles to allow lighting through the roof. What must be emphasized the amount of people whose lives are being affected by this innovation. Alfredo Moser of Brazil has experimented with solar bulbs in his home town in Brazil which has been expanded by into a day and night innovation.

MyShelter Foundation was established by our founder and executive director Illac Diaz to create a system of sustainability and reliability through its capability-building and employment-generating projects. The innovation is a two step process of beginning with a DIY daylight that is affordable, and a second most important step which is a solar cell, LED and mobile upgrade. Introducing groundbreaking social enterprise, appropriate technologies, and alternative construction in the Philippines, we have pioneered projects such as the Pier One Seafarer’s Dormitory, the Design Against the Elements (DAtE) competition, and the Bottle School Project.

In an article of Pepsi Cola Philippines posted in their website,

Pepsi Philippines, Star Cinema, and BBDO Guerrero all banded together to light up an Aeta community in Sitio Tarukan, Capas, Tarlac through MyShelter Foundation’s Liter of Light project.

For more than 20 years, the Aetas of Sitio Tarukan in Capas, Tarlac spent their nights in darkness. Suddenly, there was light in their streets and homes—courtesy of Liter of Light, a humanitarian project by the MyShelter Foundation and partners, notably Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines Inc. (PCPPI).

The Tarukan lighting project was conceptualized as a gratitude for the tribesmen’s hospitality to actor-singer and Pepsi brand ambassador Daniel Padilla who went there for a location shooting of his movie Crazy Beautiful You located more than 120 kilometres away from Manila.

The one-day project was completed last June 6 with more than 50 volunteers deployed by Pepsi and Star Cinema to installed exactly 100 solar house lights and 40 street lamps in the village, benefitting more than 400 Aeta families.

The volunteers also taught the young Aetas how to make their own solar-light box - a simple do-it-yourself lighting system that does not need electricity.

“We hope that this Pepsi Liter of Light effort for our Aeta brothers and sisters will expand their horizons, and change their lives for the better. By ending more than two decades of darkness for Tarukan, Pepsi Philippines and its partners proved that a lot can be achieved in one day, as long as hearts and minds are aligned,” said Jika Dalupan, PCPPI vice president for corporate affairs and communications.

Sitio Tarukan is located about 120 kilometers north of Manila.

Pepsi is a pioneering sponsor of MyShelter Foundation’s Liter of Light project since 2011. This project provides sustainable off-grid lighting solutions using plastic soda bottles.

The original ‘day light’ (a plastic bottle filled with bleach and water that defracts and magnifies solar energy through solar panels and a simple circuit to power an LED light inserted into the bottle. This simple technology is able to provide up to 10 hours of lighting at night, and could last up to 4 years.

“Before Liter of Light, Tarukan residents had to limit their activities come nightfall. Now, they can extend their productive hours to work more, study harder, and spend more time with family and friends.” said Maricelle Narciso, Pepsi Philippines country manager. “By lighting up their homes and streets, were improving the quality of people’s lives, and making their communities even safer than before.”

“Maraming, maraming salamat po sa tulong na ibinigay nyo sa amin,” Tarukan chieftain Lito Diaz responded.

Liter of Light is the beneficiary of Pepsi’s global campaign ‘Pepsi Challenge’ with $1 will be donated to MyShelter for every engagement made using the hashtag “#PepsiChallenge.” The proceeds would be used to light up more blighted communities worldwide.

For his part, Daniel Padilla created a tribute video for his adopted sitio featured in his June 13 sold-out concert dubbed “Most Wanted” at the Mall of Asia Arena. The hashtag #PepsiChallenge, which the video also supported, became the number one trend for the Philippines on Twitter. Resulting in tens of thousands of dollars donated to the Liter of Light project.

“Araw ‘nyo ‘to para makatulong... sana marami kayong mai-post, para marami rin tayong matulungan,” Padilla stressed.

Culture Emancipation

CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

These definitions of culture that I have read are important to know what free culture is. Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. Culture is communication, communication is culture. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning. A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.


According to Karl Fogel, an open source software developer, author, and copyright reform activist, Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn't have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other's work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world.


The opposite of "free culture" is "permission culture”. Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists such as Luis Villa and Nina Paley to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased.


Moreover, Fogel mentioned that in free culture, you just translate the book, use the song, etc. If I don't like the translation or the film, I'm free to say so, of course, but I wouldn't have any power to suppress or alter your works. Of course, free culture goes both ways: I'm also free to put out a modified copy of your movie using a different song, recommend someone else's translation that I think is better, etc. These are idealized examples, for the sake of illustration, but they give the general idea: freedom takes precedence over commercial monopolies.


Also Fogel discussed, the distilled into a few basic principles, free culture means:


· Artists can use each other’s' work without asking permission. If you're not already convinced that freedom is valuable in itself, read this. Or this. Or this.


· People can receive and transmit art by whatever physical means are available to them. We've got an Internet -- let's not be afraid to use it.


· The distinction between audience and artist is fluid, and should remain so because culture is participatory. Free culture means anyone can engage with art and other works of the mind; however they want, without hiring a lawyer first.


· Artists are paid for what they do, not for what other people do. Artists should be paid up front for the work they do. But charging again for music every time a copy is exchanged, for example, is silly. The musicians didn't do extra work to make more copies, and the copies are transactions between third parties. In the long run, making it harder to share art hurts artists as much as audiences.


· Monopolies hurt everyone except the monopolist. Permission cultures tend to concentrate control in the hands of people who specialize in accumulating control, without doing much to help artists. There's nothing wrong with running a business that deals with art and artists, of course; the problem isn't middlemen, its monopolies.


In the Copyright law of the Philippines, A copyright is the legal protection extended to the owner of the rights in an original work. Original work refers to every production in the literary, scientific, and artistic domains. The Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL), the leading agency responsible for handling the registration and conflict resolution of intellectual property rights enforce the copyright law. IPOPHL was created by virtue of Republic Act No. 8293 or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines which took effect on January 1, 1998, under the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos.


In the Intellectual Property (IP) Code of the Philippines, literary and artistic works include books, writings, musical works, films, paintings, and other works including computer programs


According to Section 172 of the Intellectual Property Code, literary and artistic works refer to the original and intellectual creations protected from the moment of their creation.

The list of literary and artistic works includes the following:

· Books, pamphlets, articles and other writings

· Periodicals and newspapers

· Lectures, sermons, addresses, dissertations prepared for oral delivery, whether or not reduced in writing or other material form

· Letters

· Dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions; choreographic works or entertainment in dumb shows

· Musical compositions, with or without word

· Works of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving, lithography or other works of art; models or designs for works of art

· Original ornamental designs or models for articles of manufacture, whether or not registrable as an industrial design, and other works of applied art

· Illustrations, maps, plans, sketches, charts and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science

· Drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character

· Photographic works including works produced by a process analogous to photography; lantern slides

· Audiovisual works and cinematographic works and works produced by a process analogous to cinematography or any process for making audio-visual recordings

· Pictorial illustrations and advertisements

· Computer programs

· Other literary, scholarly, scientific and artistic works

These laws must be taken into consideration all the time. These laws are violated when these issues simmered until the Internet came, and then they really started to copy others work without giving credit. Copying became physically so cheap as to be almost costless, and yet the laws against copying only got tighter and tighter, as a frightened industry lobbied for longer copyright terms and more restrictions. This is the dynamic that has given rise to the free culture movement. The only fear here is people copy almost everything without in the internet without giving credit to the authors. Actually, authors, photographers and the like are not so selfish in sharing their ideas and pictures, but they always say that people should give them credit if anyone has copied something from them.

Growing in Strength of our Culture

EMERGING CULTURE

According to Merriem Webster, emerging means newly created or noticed and growing in strength or popularity: becoming widely known or established. In the Philippines, there are a lot to share on this one.

Rendering the Department of Tourism’s information, the Philippines is the third largest English speaking country in the world. It has a rich history combining Asian, European, and American influences. Prior to Spanish colonization in 1521, the Filipinos had a rich culture and were trading with the Chinese and the Japanese. Spain's colonization brought about the construction of Intramuros in 1571, a "Walled City" comprised of European buildings and churches, replicated in different parts of the archipelago. In 1898, after 350 years and 300 rebellions, the Filipinos, with leaders like Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, succeeded in winning their independence.

Based on statistics and facts got, as an archipelago composed of 7,641 islands, the Philippines offers a range of attractions such as the white sand beaches of Boracay, shopping centers of Metro Manila, surfing spots in Siargao, rice terraces of Ifugao, Mayon Volcano in Albay, diving sites of Palawan, heritage houses in Vigan, and the cultural attractions of Cebu, Davao and Manila.

The pictures are not owned by me. I give credit to the owners.

The island of Luzon is considered the political and economic center of the Philippines. The economy of Luzon is centered in Metro Manila, the national capital region. Manila was ranked 11th most attractive city for American shoppers out of 25 Asia Pacific cities by a Global Blue survey in 2012. Shopping malls can be found around the metropolis, especially in the business and financial districts of Makati, Ortigas and Bonifacio Global City. Despite the rise of modern shopping malls, traditional Filipino shopping centers such as flea markets and bazaars still remain around the metropolis. Nightlife is also one of the attractions in Manila, plenty of world-class bars and clubs are found across like Valkyrie Nightclub, Revel Nightclub & Lounge, Chaos Manila, The Palace Pool Club, and Privé Luxury Club.

The Visayas, the central island group of the Philippines, is the heart of the country's biodiversity. The most popular beach destination in Visayas is Boracay: the island is popular for its pure white sand beaches and has been a favorite island destination for local and foreign visitors. In 2012, Boracay received the "best island" award from the international travel magazine Travel + Leisure. Aside from its white sand beaches, Boracay is also a popular destination for relaxation, tranquility and an exciting nightlife.

Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines, is known for its mountain ranges; it is one of the best climbing destinations in the Philippines. Mindanao is home to the country's highest mountain, Mount Apo. On average, it takes two days to reach the summit. The mountain has a wide range of flora and fauna, including over 272 bird species, 111 of which are endemic to the area, including the national bird, the Philippine eagle. Mount Apo has become a popular hiking destination for mountain climbers.

According to the article 10 interesting facts about the Philippines by an ESL teacher, Filipinos and their culture are enormously influenced by the United States’ (US) culture. The U.S. heavily influenced the land with U.S. culture and language during its rule over the Philippines from 1898 to 1946. Many westerns will feel at home when visiting the Philippines.

The Philippines comprises of 7,107 islands and hundreds of volcanoes. Manila, Cebu, Angles City and all other big and small cities in the country are essentially islands, surrounded by water.

Filipinos are extremely fond of texting through cell phones. This has earned the country the title of being “the text capital of the world”. On average, everyday around 450 million SMS are sent by 35 million registered subscribers in the country

The Philippines is not only a popular tourist destination for westerns and Asians, it’s also a place where many from the other countries retire to. The country is exceptionally open to foreigners and many of them end up marrying into local families. This is seen in different places in the Philippines.

One interesting fact about the Philippines is English is not only one of the official languages in the Philippines, most people speak English in the country. In cities and semi-urban areas, one will rarely have a problem of not being able to communicate to locals. Almost everyone, young or old, speaks fairly good English in the Philippines. Furthermore, there are lots of dialects that surely enrich the Philippine culture like Ilocano, Cebuano and Kapampangan that strengthen our culture.