GRE Essay: Understand contemporary culture by the youth's analysis.

[Konstantin]

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Question:
The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.

Answer:
In assertion that we could acquire the knowledge about the contemporary culture through the observation of young people the speaker fails to acknowledge that culture itself is too complex category to limit it with only youth’s trends. Nevertheless, I agree with the statement since youth is the most active part of our society and the mirror of all global chops and changes.

Admittedly, when a person is young, his feelings are vivid and he wants to express them by all possible means. At all times, young people were considered as an engine of every progressive movement. It was youth, that have propelled completely new trends; hippies in 1960’s or punks in 1970’s. When old people go away from their former radical behavior, new young people take up their places and it causes the permanent change and development of the entire culture. Someone could say that it’s hard to understand culture through the youth’s observation because verdant persons are so volatile: on one day they prefer rock, on another they are able to sacrifice themselves in order to keep up Gothic. But the culture itself changes every day; such fluctuations are the necessary part of it and exactly young people exaggerate these alterations.

But let’s try to understand what culture is. It’s not a narrow category like just painting or music, it is rather a full complex of all our activities, through which we want to express ourselves and which represent our milieu. I suppose that considering culture as either underground or mainstream, we can analyze it from different points of view.

Experience tells us that the underground culture depends completely on the young people, ones who want to express their own individuality and feel the community spirit. You could learn a lot about contemporary standards talking with young people from the specific subculture: skaters, emos and so on. All of them have specific habits, language and methods of self-expression; so, bringing together all this discrepant experience we could acquire the full image of the underground culture. Often we have seen relatively old people, 40 years old punks for example, who try to remain a part of any particularly underground subculture. However, I believe that such attempts aren’t the expression of the contemporary culture; it simply represents that a person have been living in his own past, maintaining old traditions. They are relicts from the past, rather than vivid representatives of a new epoch.

At the same time, I’m convinced that the mainstream culture is formed by private businesses and governments, whose aims are to have a profit or maintain certain social order respectively. On the one hand, all these pop-stars, advertisements and manifold commodities form the appreciation of materialistic value among the people of all ages. On the other, youth is the most vulnerable, among an entire population, for such impacts and, rather than inspect TV channels or CEOs intents, we should see on children and young adults, like in the mirror of the overall culture.

In sum, culture is a very complicated category; however, inspecting the trends of young people we could comprehend it quite thoroughly.