Adam Abadilla

Period 2
1/15/11
How is Culture an ever changing force in the world today?

The key to finding out how culture changes, lies within understanding Culture
itself. To me, culture is how a person behaves throughout their life. Their fashion sense,
body language, morals, and beliefs are all parts of a person’s lifestyle, but these things are
easily influenced by friends, family, and society as a whole. I think while growing up,
you generally do the things your parents teach you. You’ll most likely use the language
they try to teach you as a baby, your taste preferences would adapt to what they’d cook,
and you dress yourself with the clothes they provide for you. However, as you get older,
you become much more independent, and you begin to start making a lot of choices for
yourself.

A lot of things (languages, music, fashion, ETC) change over time, some more
rapidly than others. I think that most people choose their lifestyle based upon what’s
around them. When you want to fit in, you dress like everyone else, listen to popular
music, and do things that other people do too. And when these things change, you also
change. Here’s an example, people come up with new terms (or phrases) all the time.
Terms like “Epic Fail!” or “Google it” have come up relatively recently, and that’s
because times have changed. When you hear these terms multiple times, they almost
become part of your vocabulary. Now, these are examples that I have dealt with, but on
other parts of the world, culture changes differently. Here’s an example, in 2009, the
country of Iran broke out in violent protests after the disputed victory of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad for Iranian President. Supporters of Mahmoud and supporters for the
opposing candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi clashed. But with today’s technology, Iranians
had a safe way to communicate what had been going on there, and that is with Twitter.
Twitter provided an easy, efficient, and uncensored way for Iranians to get the word out.
This is probably the first time twitter had been used in a very serious way. The posts
made about the Iran Protests really shook up the internet and other parts of the world as
well.

As you can see, culture is definitely an ever-changing force. Cultures will never
slow down, they’ll just evolve. People will always find newer ways to accomplish things,
therefore moving technology forward. New advances give people more opportunities to
do things, and it’s all a domino effect. With everything from music to technology
evolving, it’s very hard to tell what it will be like in just a matter of years.