How to to understand contemporary culture of a society

509 Words3 Pages
What's the most effective way to understand contemporary culture of a society? The speaker asserts that to analyze the trends of its youth serves the purpose best. While I concede that the assertion holds merits in many respects, I cannot concur with the speaker totally for the statement fails to give an overall approach to understand the contemporary culture in that it overlooks the importance of other age groups. As the most vigorous people/group of the society, the youth plays a significant role in the culture field as they introduce new forms of culture and reflect to a rather great extent the contemporary culture. For instance, in music field it is always the youth that represent the current culture trend which prevails in society. When rock music, hip-hop and other music began to emerge in China, it was the youngsters that accepted and appreciated them first and spread these styles of music throughout China. The same holds true now in China; if you want to know what is in fashion and to further understand the contemporary culture in my country or any other country, you should never ignore the trends of its youth. However, at the same time, we should be prudent in the process of understanding contemporary culture through the trends of the youth. As we all know the youth are too vigorous to focus one given entity of culture for a long time, which may mislead people at times. Several years ago, the young in my country had a fervent crazy on coloring their hairs (you know, our hair is black), and if outsiders take that as part of our culture, they are misled. So it requires people to penetrate through the superficial phenomena during the analyzing of the trends of the youth. After all, we should acknowledge the significance to analyze the trends of the youth in the process of understanding current culture, but we should also keep in mind that the youth do
Open Document