Issue 6. (8/4)
“The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.”
I agree with the statement. Culture is a dynamic phenomenon that never takes a fixed and static form, and the trends of young people often imply the burgeoning difference out of mainstream culture. Their tastes and lifestyle mean how they are enacted, inscribed, opposed to, and reenacted under social mechanism. The term “generation gap” actually serves as a positive and the most effective bridge enabling access to the cultural alteration.
First of all, take the trend of Taiwanese female youth as an example. When the TV shows televise a bunch of girls commodifying their bodies and gloating it as a new fashion, we see the tradition that sanctifies sex as a private behavior shatters. With the encouragement of the hosts, young girls are giggling about their sexual intercourse with the pride about the amounts of it, and above all, about their own frivolous attitudes. As many media fashion the behaviors, we know culture undertakes a different dimension at the moment. The point concerns not only the limited sense of attitudes toward sex, but more about an eagerness to overthrow the prior authentic tradition, about young people identifying themselves with daring and reversing acts.
Secondly, and a phenomenon shared largely in size, are the addiction to some technological gadgets, such as cell phones, internets. etc. While the technology itself is a neutral thing, those who operate it are not. The displacement of the sense of reality by the virtual world tells the pending aloofness among human relationships. This is also a prediction that the traditional sense of community is facing a striking transformation. What connects people in the past will not remain as powerful as it used to be, and the upcoming substitutes are still yet taking a clear form. Whether this is a historical transition period or not is unsure, while this definitely characterizes contemporary culture.
In conclusion, since culture is a phenomenon in flow all the time, to observe it at the point where it takes change means the most effective way. Just as there isn’t much to change in adulthood, there isn’t much to remain the same in adolescence.
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