High Art, Low Culture, and Mass Media

It is easy to see how television could overtake radio as the dominant broadcast medium. Through the
efforts of George Carey, Ferdinand Braun, Kalman Tihanyi, John Logie Baird, and many others, the
techonology of TV, like radio, was able to penetrate private spaces deeply and its messages were sent
aimultaneously, instantaneously, and broadly. But it had the additional attraction of being visual,
combining the capacity of cinema with that of the broadcast medium. In different places during the 1940s
to 1950s, radio saw growth and diversification, at the same time that its news, musical and narrative
formats, as week as its artists, gave rise to the popularity of television. innovations woukd further
television's popularity, like tge turn of color pictures and the coming of video cssettes, video discs, cable,
satellite, digital and interactive texhnologies, which offered to the consumer greater control and variety of
content.

Interestingly, radio was not eclipsed by TV. In urban spaces that could not admit television, such as the
workplace and vehicles, radio remained vital. In the peripheries of cities and in rural areas, radio abided
as an accessible source of entertainment and news. Recorded music, which started with Thomas Alva
Edison's phonograph (1877) and was considerably enhanced by audio-tape recording, supported rather
than downplayed radio. Recording companies provided radio stations with music, hoping that airplays
would result to sales. Kadio played pop singles that listeners liked to hear again and again, which helped
radio stations earn revenue from advertisers. Interestingly, even with the arrival of vynil records, ,cassette
tapes, compact discs, and the portable walkman, discman, and mp3 players, radio has persisted into the
age of the Internet, with audio streaming and apps like Last.fm that imitate the curated randomness of
radio broadcast.

App is short for "application," a computer sottware designed to pertorm specific tasks, like play music,
record notes, edit images, and many more

Since mass media like radio and televiSIOn are aimed atmasses of people they have been the site of
ongoing cultiural politics, or the contestation of which cultural meanings should be considered as
dominant/high/in and subordinate/low/out. On the one hand, there are media consumers, who may
possess sophisticated taste in "finer arts like painting and poetry and who prefer "highbrow media content,
like jazz over pop or the experimental recordings of The Beatles over their Top 40 hits. On the other
hand, there is the undeniable prevalence of popular taste which dictates the indefinite continuation of
jukebox novelties and cheesy love songs. The clash between these classes of media consumers
dialogically affects the evolution of media forms. There was a time when jazz was lowbroW, and The
Beatles sang trite love songs. The critically acclaimed composition liked by a few and the popularly loved
ditty hummed by the crowd sometimes converge, such as in the works of George Gershwin or Lucio San
Pedro.

Photography and cinema may be understood better in light of these clashes between high art and low
culture. First introduced by L. J. M. Daguerre (1839), photography disrupted the dominance of print
media's linearity by allowing people to draw again on caves, as it were. It was clear how photography
could be used for scientific observation, news gathering, and portraiture. And yet while it satisfied
humanity's ancient urge to mimic the world, it was not always considered as a medium of art. Modernists
steered the visual arts away from photography s mimicking capacity in the early years, while photography
ran after the tendencies of modernism as a way to reenter the world of high art.

Dialogic, based on theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's work, means a continuous dialogue extended in many
different directions and including many different works.
The mass production of photography, through George Eastman's Kodak camera (1889), Polaroid instant
camera (1948), and digital photography today, put the medium in the hands of the ordinary person, further
away from the specialized skill of visual artists. This meant, especially in this cyber era, that
photorealism, for better or worse, will not be the universal standard of beauty or truth. As evidenced by
apps that manipulate digital images, the sense of aestheticizing the world through framing, angling
distancing, blocking, lighting, coloring, and filtering, has become "second nature” to ordinary people with
access to the camera, without turning them into “artists”. Moreover, photography has allowed non-
specialists to be moved by pictures whose beauty emanates from vital memory and personal attachment.
Hence, gazing at a Van Gogh painting is one aesthetic experience that is different from but not any lesser
than contemplating the face of your grandmother who has passed away and yet remains alive in the
photograph.

Motion picture, first introduced by the Lumière Brothers (1895), also faced a similar dilemma in its
infancy. It took many years, with the effort of artists and theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Rudolf
Arnheim, to win the battle of calling cinema "art." But even in those years, cinema tended toward being a
medium of mass attraction than a medium of fine art. Up to this day, most people go to the movies not
because they want to behold art.

Canema, as such, is a mass medium, and it is popular for its "lowbrow" melodramas, love stories, and
action genres. Along with radio and television, cinema turned certain individuals into stars and masses of
people into fans."Art" films and the coming of camcorders and digital cameras, which have given artists
tools to independently produce unconventional films, have not overturned the "low" culture defined by
the dynamics of stars and fans.

But taste is not neutral. People who prefer "high" art and who condescend toward consumers or
"lowbrow" media are certainly not better than anyone else in any fundamental way, and yet they maintain
attitudes that secure their superiority in a cultural hierarchy. It may be a case of gaining a higher degree of
literacy, in order to discriminate against one who is rendered "lower" or lack of the same literacy. We see
this at work when a fluent English-speaker mocks the ungrammaticalities of another, on account of the
value associated with the English language. We see this in the long history of a class of people who look
down on the "other," the bakya, jolog jejemon, iskwater, ulikba, pandak, bakla, badjao, among others, not
motivated by any desire tor fairness or understanding but on the exaggerated opinion of oneself afforded
by economic and cultural capital. It was sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who elaborated on the significance of
these capitals. Economic capital is convertible to money, while cultural capital refers to nonfinancial
assets, such as education, fashion sense, and media taste that can result in social mobility or economic
gain. Such capitals stands for power, and those who possess such capital/power wield it and wish to keep
it at the expense of those who do not possess it.

The idea is very simple. Is one who has more money, education, and taste "higher" than the other who has
little or none of the same capital? Most certainly not.

In fact, the many that prefer the lowbrow have in their hands the power to move history; it is for this
reason that literacy is an urgent need by the many, at the same time that the few urgently need to learn
from the many. For instance, through the movie roles of Nora Aunor as movie fan, amateur singer, atsay,
putok sa buho, probinsiyana, palengkera, overseas Filipino worker, and many others, we can gain a sense
of the deep aspirations and the great capacity for action ot ordinary people who find that the Superstar is
like us. In many cases, those who supposedly have better taste end up looking down on and hating the
many whom they consider as stupid and ignorant, thereby taking the side of the oppressor.
Cultural politics have direct impact on national politics, too. Joseph Estrada, an action star who has for
many years played the role of the savior of the oppressed, is beloved by the underclass who have
constantly voted to put him in positions of authority, even after he has been convicted of plunder. In 1965,
the films Daigdig ng Mga Api and Iginuhit ng Tadhana were released. The tormer is Diosdado
Macapagal's campaign movie depicting the oppression of farmers and their eventual turn for the better
with the help of the government; it won critical acclaim and many awards. The latter is Ferdinand
Marcos's biopic, showing him as a brilliant and noble man; it was a box-office succeSs. Marcos, as we
know, won out and became P'resident of the Philippines. It is true, then, that the voting masses need to be
educated so that they do not uncritically elect stars and showbiz personalities into public office. It is
equally true, hoOwever, that the educated few who supposedly know better have continually failed and
betrayed the many.

ln these examples we can see the irony, volatility, and double-edged possibility of mass media. Mass
media can be viewed as the spectacle of social relations (e-g, of the relationship between stars and tans),
promoting both a unitied culture and complacency toward oppression. Mass media can also be seen as
producing a commodified culture (as incarnated by the star) that, in turn, produces a consumerist audience
(as incarnated by fans) that buy and perpetuate the culture." But mass media can also be understood as a
site of negotiation, where the media producer intends to mean something witn a message, while the media
consumer willfully decides and assigns a different meaning on the same message.

Is one who has more money, education, and taste "higher" than the other who has little or none of the
same capital? Most certainly not

There is, therefore, a lot at stake in cultural politics in mass media other than high art or low culture. It is
ObVIOUs at we cannot simply change our taste, but it should also be clear that matters of taste are merely
personal. They have actual consequences in histony, not only in the evolution of media forms but in
waging struggles that end up seating presidents or driving crowds to rally in the streets. This is why media
literacy is essential and why it is of utmost importance that we understand where we stand as human
bengs im relation to mass culture.

PONDER

Just around the time when musIc videos and "MTVs" were becoming popular in the late 1970s and early
1980s, The Buggles recorded the song, "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1979). Watch the music Video
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-DXRLazs\.

1. How, according to the song, did "video kill the radio star"? Is this a good thing, as far as the song goes?
2 What is the "wireless in '52" referring to?
3. What does the line, "They took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine and new
technology," mean?
4. What do you think is the music video saying about technology?
5. What are the song and the music video saying about the relationship of technology with concepts like
a. art d. innocence
b. originality e. nostalgia
c. Popular culture f. boredom

Virtual Communities and the Global Village

McLuhan, referring to radio and television, observed that "new electronic interdependence recreates the
world in the image of a global village. When he used the term "global village" in the 1960s, we can
imagine Mcluhan thinking of Canadians watching United States news about Vietnam. As such, the world
has been shrunk by television, pulling North Amnericans and Southeast Asians nearer each other. Do you
think Mcluhan would have found the Internet cool, or what?

Vissionaries conceptualized and created prototypes of what eventually made the Internet possible. Charles
Babbage imagined an "analytic engine" (1837) that could mechanically solve computing problems
through punched cards. Alan Turing introduced the notion of a "universal machine" (1936) that could
perform any conceivable mathematical computation through algorithms and could be programmed to
execute the tasks of any other machine. Later he proposed an "electronic calculator (1945), envisioned to
be an electronic, rather than a mechanical, computer. In the same year, John von Neumann described a
stored-program computer that would run on circuit design and memory, and Vannevar Bush hypothesized
the “memex”, which would technologize the capacity of the human mind to store memories and index
them. Ted Nelson realized Bush's idea of the hypertext, or a text that is linked to other texts, through
Project Xanadu (1960). In the 1960s, Douglas Englebart worked on file-linking, real-time collaborative
control, command inputting, windowing, pointing and-clicking, and word processing, and demonstrated
such a computer in action in 1968. Companies like Xerox PARC, Apple, IBM, and others commercialized
and further innovated Englebarť's personal computer from the 1970s throughout the 1990s.

Tim Berners-Lee conceptualized the World Wide Web (1989), which could hyperlink information through
a web of networked nodes anywhere and anytime. Various hardware, especially the modem that encodes
and decodes difterent kinds of signals into digital information, turned Berners-Lee's dream of the Internet
into a widespread reality. When browsers allowed people to easily log on to and navigate through the
World Wide Web,Dot.com companies were founded, oftering internet users new types of media content,
such as personal web pages, web directories (e-g, Yahool), and online encyclopedias. But by 19, Darcy
DiNucci heralded Web 2.0, which would go beyond the Dot.com worid and was to be a transport
mechanism, the ether througn which interactivity nappens. It will...appear on your computer screen. TV
set, car dashboard, cell phone, handheld game machines, Maybe even your microwave oven". It was
TimO'Reilly, in 2004, who popularized the term web 2.0 to refer to second-generation Internet
applications that allow people to create, Share, and modify online content and that intensity interaction
and collaboration. Blogs, wikis, Social networking and media uploding sites are embodiments of Web 2.0

Concurrently, telephones became wireless. With integrated circuits and silicon, computers started to come
n smaller and smaller sizes, from laptops to palmtops. Apple pioneered the iPhone (2007) and the iPad
(2010), making computers handy and combining them with telecommunicating capacities. Many other
companies designed their own smartphones and tablets and turned to open and accessible operating
systems, such as Android. These smartphones and tablets were easily interconnected through smart
modems powered by telecommunication systems and other means. Through these developments, Web 2.0
did not only connect phones, watches, glasses, pens, and televisions, but also turned the web into a
dynamic social sphere, where users interact, communicate, and co create content and value. This "social
web", as Harri and Henry Oinas Kukkonen picture it, is a humanized "innovation ecosystem", which
"conglomerates individual innovators personal creativity, collaborative brainstorming, business sense and
technological opportunities" Simply check out the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, to find a
flood of software innovations.

Cloud computing, moreover, harnessed the innovation ecosystem that is the social web by enabling
people to gain access to shared computing resources, like virtual storage or third-party services. This
means, for example, that an innovative entrepreneur will not need to invest on costly hardware that is
worn out and becomes obsolete or will not need to hire a software specialist whose task is only incidental
to her own innovation. She simply shops for a cloud vendor that maintains the hardware and manages the
software that she needs and pays for these services as needed, so she can focus on her expertise. The
cloud is a figurative term that pictures activities that are hidden somewhere and yet are to be found
anywhere, With Web 2.0 and the cloud, everyone - in theory-could be interacting and collaborating in the
global village anytime, with anyone from anywhere.