The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
Thesis: I strongly agree that analyzing the trends of the youth is the most effective way to understand the contemporary society for two reasons. First, the behaviours of the youth often reflect the values of not just themselves but that of their parents and teachers. Second, it is fairly straight-forward to analyze their behaviors through data from the social media and the credit card transaction.
ts1: The trends of the youth can reflect the values and attitudes of the young people as well as their parents, the two groups of people that form the dominant forces shaping the contemporary culture.
One way to understand the contemporary culture is to look at what the young people buy for clothes, books and entertainment. (follow the money)
it will also somehow reflect the parents’ attitudes as they utlimately foot the bills
another approach is to consider what they have to say about what they bought when interacting with others (the talk about the products makes the stories that can reflect the culture)
ts2: the consumption trend could be studied by analyzing the credit card transaction records of the parents and the young people
- big data is now available electronically and shared among the financial insitutitions and the corporations
- maybe studied through data mining
ts3: the talk about the consumption could be studied through analyzing the social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- natural language processing
- hashtag
- image recognition