[i习作temp] Issue6 年轻人与当代文化求拍【有拍必回】 [复制链接]

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电梯直达

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发表于 2010-3-6 12:06:30 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

Issue6: 461 words 45 minutes
The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.

In my observation, when we are trying to identify or generalize the cultural features of a particular country or an area, many things are taken into consideration. Youth culture, as well as the adult or old-fashioned culture, is indispensible factor to understand contemporary culture effectively.

The youth represents the most fashionable part of the culture, which reflects the latest trend in every corner of the society, such as value system, technology, behavioral patterns and life style. From the trend of youth, we can get a clear vision about the freshest aspect or even the future of the culture. For example, the typical out looking of the younger generation, especially college students, is large T-shirt with jeans, rather than elegant suits that the older generations like white-collars always dress. The dressing trend of youth is a facial way to express the contemporary young cultural inclination to freedom and self-comfort. By analyzing the youth, a general understanding of the young culture, which is a crucial part of the whole culture, can be gained easily.
However, only realizing what the youth culture is like is far from enough to get a comprehensive view of the present culture. As youth takes only a proportion of the whole population, we have to investigate the other population, like adults and the elderly, to understand the culture from a differential perspective.

For example, R&B as a symbol of youth music can only let us know the latest musical trend is a specific area. Nevertheless, if we want to have an idea in depth about the overall feature of an area's music style, we have to include the older genres, which we can only gain by studying and analyzing the elderly. Folk, hard rocks, and all the other music genres which have been popular among the elderly, together with the young R&B， form the contemporary music culture in a more inclusive way.

The same can be applied to other fields of culture, like painting, dancing, sculpture and so forth. No one can have an enough understanding of the contemporary culture through studying only part of the population, no matter the youth or the elderly. At any given time, contemporary culture is such a mixed set that comprises various types and styles that simply analyzing a particular group of people will certainly lead to an unobjective or unrepresentative view. Having lost particular characteristics of the culture at particular time, such view can not be used to identify an area from cultural aspect. No more to say to help identify the whole area’s spirits.

In sum, in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of current culture, we should study the groups of people as many as possible, for each of the group represents only a part of the culture at present, no matter the groups are based on age, religious belief or some other features. Analyzing only specific groups of people will undoubtedly result in a loss in the whole view.

There’s nothing to lose.