Philippine Visual Urban Culture

Through the years, we Filipinos has been endeared to foreign blood all over the world due to our hospitality, diligence, bravery, and selflessness, not to mention the innate qualities of being “makadiyos, makatao, at makabansa”. The Philippines, our country, our home, has significantly played a great role in shaping the way we Pinoys think, act, and exist. Yet, through imbibed and dominated with traditional culture of rural life, and with agriculture as one of our main source of livelihood, Philippines has been entering to new ventures be it in science and technology, going with the flow together with the fast-paced world. Philippine Visual Urban Culture by Jaymee Siao talks about the three aspects of urban space, the environment where majority of Pinoys call home. In here, the author brings us to a space dominated by three facets: billboards, bridges, and monuments[270], a space filled with panopticons, liberal minds, commercial and industrial institutions, smoke, traffic, a space colored by hues of power, desires, resistances, thus called urban space.
Siao brilliantly exposed Philippines as a site of resistance through billboards along EDSA[270], the Postmodern Sociocultural Phenomenon pictured as a bridge[274], and the National Imaginaire through monuments[281].
I agree with how the author textualized the cultural norms of our society, particularly, that of the inherent commercialization and industrialization through the form of billboards, the panopticons encompassing along the length of Highway 54 now called EDSA. EDSA, once a site of memory, a serving site for the revolution of the Filipino people, the marked place of our resistance towards dictatorship, is now the perfect haven for the advertising world, layered with dizzying images of men and women in jeans and shoes. Yet through the engulfing mass media, people have still managed to resist the ways capitalism has turned everything into commodities. We have still risen against or more realistically