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Old 05-25-2004, 05:39 PM   #1
DracIV
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Join Date: Nov 2003
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Default Subcultures in America Essay

This is an essay I have been working on for school recently. Please read it over and give comments and suggestions/debate. Thanks.


Recently many new subcultures have formed around media and products that attract similar people. In return, the media and products also gather around the subculture and mold themselves to match it. Because of this two-way mirror effect, our overall culture and views have shifted greatly from those seen in the past. Instead of thinking of one overall culture affecting the country like those seen in previous decades, we think in terms of different subcultures and those people. The numbers of subcultures has increased to the point that our children are facing increasing confusion about who they are. And possibly the worst of all, we still see others in terms of stereotypical main cultures and that automatically seperates them from us, making it harder for people to feel comfortable with people from other countries.

Now when you think about those around you, you don’t think, “American, American, American, American,” you think, “businessman, head-banger, rapper, geek.” In past decades we could pin a single set of cultural tendencies to a large portion of the country, like the era of Disco, or the hippies during the Vietnam War. Although little more than half the population actually participated in those fads and trends, the fads atleast gave people a cultural definition. Now when you look back at the decade just past, the 90s, the only strong image of the people to be found is the Dotcom Bust. This doesn’t even come close to defining an era, and makes it more obvious that we don’t have a single defining culture anymore.

Beyond just going to a few subcultures, we now have hundreds of them. This makes for a confusing environment when kids are growing up, because they can never be totally sure what the expectations of them are, what they are supposed to do. Kids are given so many choices that many are left unable to decide for the future and end up having their group chosen for them. When you look at our schools today, the traditional view of the forced groups is one divided into many different sections like the jocks, the geeks, the popular kids, etc. This is usually voluntary, but it can limit how the kids mature and what happens to them after they graduate. If a kid joins the group of geeks, then the peer pressure from other children often convinces them to stay close to that group, to center their interests around only that subculture. Even the members of other groups try to convince people to stay in only a few areas, not to expand and become whatever you want to be in the future, but to stay as you are now with no growth. We have so many subcultures now that several of those groups even start in early childhood, limiting development even further by cutting it off early.

The worst effect that is a base seperation between us and all people who are “different” because of nation or time. We have trouble seeing the existing subcultures in other countries and times because of the distance, and that makes it so that we see only the main culture, and then that becomes a stereotype. With all our subcultures, people are used to seeing someone and automatically putting them in a group without straying too dangerously far from the truth of who that person is. However, when we see foreigners or much older people, we automatically put them in that single culture that we see from their country or time. Instead of allowing you to choose a fair, objective course of action, it totally jades and ruins the reliability of your actions towards people from other countries and eras. That then goes even further and creates a bias on the view of every single action done by the governments of other countries in all times, causing people to transfer dislike of a government to dislike of individuals. If the French attacked us, we should all be seriously worried that others among us might hate and possibly attack the French who are visiting America. The simple correction is to be careful in how you treat those from other countries because your initial view cannot be trusted.

In the end, we can see a supposed major shift from the past. However, we do focus much more on individual subcultures in how we view each other now than before, which then leads to wrong views on other cultures and people. Our children also face limited futures when they join very early subcultures, and all of our later subcultures are aligned with those. The overall point is that people cannot base views of each other or themselves off of the images related to the cultures or subcultures that people are in, especially with the increasing number of subcultures that we face every day.
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