Evolving Systems course, week 6: cultural diversity and change

I'd like to start off with a quote that would have been far more appropriate at the beginning of the course, but it's just so wonderful that I have to share it:

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
I believe this is a Douglas Adams quote. I saw it the other day and it just made me think of our conversations in class, so I had to share it, even though we've begun focusing on a much smaller part of the universe.

Speaking of which, here we go with culture! I just wanted to say how much I love love loved the story about the three generations of treasure boxes. It was a beautiful story, and so well told. I was constantly drawn in, waiting to see what was in each box. So kudos to the writer of the treasure box story! It also really made me think about the definition of the word "treasure" and what it can mean depending on who's saying it. Treasure in this story was different from generation to generation, but there were still similarities. Different things could be considered treasure based on your age, what you've lived through, where you've come from... I really liked the thought path that your paper set me upon! :]

This week is tough. I don't know how I feel about cultural change... do I notice it? Sometimes. Do I like it? I guess, usually. Do I know why it happens? More often than not, no. I guess the cultural change that, I feel, has happened quite recently and has come in "full force", so to speak, would be the creation of new groups within the American population (i.e. lax bros, guidos/ guidettes). How did these come about and how have these individuals and their respective cultures become so prominent? 

Take for example "lax bros"- or lacrosse brothers. These “men” are part of a cultural phenomenon that has evolved due to the recent spread of lacrosse, a sport that was invented by the Native Americans hundreds of years ago. Lax bros have many defining characteristics, for example: flo (hair style), Sperry’s, high Nike socks (black or white), lacrosse apparel (including but not limited to lax pennies), lanyards, disrespect towards women, and an obsession with sex/ pot/ alcohol (see Natty’s and “icing”: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=icing ). Also see: http://mylifeisbro.com/ . These bros are easily spotted and are also infamous, even on the Bryn Mawr campus. Any mention of the Haverford’s lacrosse team leads to a comment along the lines of “stay away from them!!”

So how did such a group of people form this distinct culture in such a short amount of time ( greatest outburst has been <2 years)?!? Well, no one knows for sure. Google-ing “how did lax bros come about” produces no viable results; but if I really had to guess I’d say it started with the type of person who would play lacrosse. The sport spread through the male community amongst athletes who love what the sport offers: aggression, speed, versatility, agility. It has been said that lacrosse was bound to become popular due to the fact that it “…has the passing finesse and strategy of soccer, the speed and contact of hockey and more scoring than both of those sports combined…” (Source David Adriesen, Seattle PI) Take its predisposition for popularity and combine that with big, aggressive men and voila! Change. As far as the details of “lax bro-ness”, it probably started with the most talented players. A certain top scorer wore high socks and soon enough, everyone on the team was wearing high socks- perhaps in hopes his skill would rub off onto them; soon enough, entire leagues were wearing high socks and now all lacrosse players (women too) wear these distinctive socks. Though we will likely never be capable of pointing to an origin for every aspect of this distinct culture, for now, we can just sit back and appreciate the madness that is “lax bros” and wait for the next trend to come along.

Well, I can't really think of anything i really want to add, so i'll just continue with Thursday's discussion.

On Thursday we talked about why pop culture changes, but we really focused on fashion. It is my opinion that it's not one person or one group of elites who pick what comes next, but it's not totally the masses either.  I believe that culture is predictable and whoever that select group of people is can anticipate what comes next and produce fashion and movies and culture and crap before we even realize what it is that we want. (By the way, I mention movies because the Musical is back and it went out of fashion for a looong time. Celebration!) What i mean to say is, we build off each other to produce what comes next. It's not one or the other. Hardly anything is totally black and white, anyways.  And you know, it's not like fashion is new, either (I know we mentioned this) because it was copied from the 80s with a big mix of everything else. It also is really pushing boundaries, like making things once thought to be tacky awesome (like dual-toned leggings and garments made entirely of lace) and things that used to be a fashion faux pas an "it thing" (like big shirts and leggings for pants [which i still find unfortunate fashion choice]). 

Another part of fashion/pop culture is the celebrities and what they wear. For example, i'm sure there's already lady gaga-licious stuff out there. Lately i've been noticing these horrendous furry hats with wolfy ears, and just yesterday i realized that Ke$ha wears one in the My First Kiss music video. Curse you, Ke$ha.  But this brings up another point: the internet is a huge source of real life pop culture, particularly youtube. I am an avid youtube viewer, and i believe fully in its potential social and political power. Youtubers have done so much through the fandom communities created by awesome vloggers (n. those who post video blogs) like the Vlogbrothers who i know do multiple charity events. Anyway, my point is that the internet adds a new dimension to pop culture and fashion and whatnot and also makes it unpredictable because the most random things go viral and nobody can guess what will come next because it hasn't been made yet. It also speeds up the process of what's 'cool' to weeks and months instead of years. example: remember the Numa Numa song? It's not that awesome anymore, but they took part of it and turned it into a song by T.i. and Rihanna which was pretty big. Oh well, i thought it was cool.

I really enjoyed discussing about the similarities and differences between cultural evolution and biological evolution. Like rest of classmates agreed during the lesson, I found the continuity of our course. This aspect of course makes me feel excited to learn what the individual evolution would be. I think that cultural evolution is similar to biological evolution. But they are not the same. It takes a really long period of time for genetic changes to become phenotypical changes since most of our genes are non-coding. However, it is really fast for cultural change to occur. For example, Chinese people like to wear grey, black and dark blue clothes before Chinese government implementing reform and open-up policy. Just after merely 20 years, Chinese has totally changed their choices of color. In contrast, the genetic changes for humans occur over a few generations.

Regarding to cultural changes, there have been a large amount of cultural changes since industrial evolution. It is because that with the help of machines, people are able to free themselves from strenuous manual work and, thus, we could have extra time and money to search for different ways to improve our living standards. Moreover, human beings are intelligent creatures. Language is an important tool for human beings to transfer their knowledge and experiences from one generation to the next generation. By doing so, we are able to reserve our own culture and modify it to adapt to the new environment.

I think that women starting to take leadership positions is the most recent cultural changes experienced by us. I think that this example can well prove that cultural changes in our society are not really controlled by anyone in the top position. The change is driven by the big social environment. It is because that tertiary industries becomes more important than secondary manufacturing industries in most developed countries. Hence man's intrinsic strength is no longer important and required for service-based industries. However, women ,who are believed to have better communicative skills than men, are able to perform better than men. Hence, cultural change is just an inevitable trend.

I mean really, it's ridiculous. It's exciting, this ridiculous complicated existence, but sometimes it's just too much to try to think through. Diversity and change are good examples of things that can be really hard to think through.
My automatic response to why there's a diversity of cultures is that there's a diversity of human beings. Why is there a diversity of human beings? Because of accumulated changes in alleles, which happen partially at random, partially because of other changes in other alleles, which leads me into rant on homozygosity, bottlenecking, and cheetahs. So, we [I; I refer to myself in plural a potentially disturbing amount of the time] have decided that humans are different from each other the same way they're different from any other species only... uh, the same species. That made perfect sense. Let's roll with it! So if all humans (save for identical twins and the clones I wish the government secretly had) have different genetic material, then it doesn't seem too strange to think they think would differently. We are removing the environmental variable at the moment because that would just start a whole 'which came first, the chicken or the egg' cycle and I can't do that right now.
Even people who have similar ideas don't think the exact same thing, and no matter how much humans attempt to cultivate a hive mind that is, to my knowledge at this moment, mind-bogglingly improbable. I think at this point I was going to say something about populations? Gene pools? Something about the bone marrow registry and genomic medicine, Tibetans (they are really popular in our class, hm?), and probs something about Basques (which makes me think about Finnish, but that's all language-- can I talk about that right now? Language is culture, and culture is language, but once I start talking about language I'll never shut up). I get so caught up in looking at things that I forget what I was originally meaning to say. But I'm guessing that the above words were all meant to be examples of genetic differences that become an obvious part of cultural differences.
Okay, so diversity is because of genes, the differences in which are caused by change but also cause change. So cultures change the same way alleles in a population fluctuate: breeding. One aspect of a culture that is popular is selected for, and so is passed on to the next generation, but something may happen and it becomes less favorable, or the next generation may just decide to hell with it, or it may carry on.
As for how we can make sense of such changes? I don't know. I doubt any human really knows, or cultural change would be more fluid and acceptable than it is now (or ever was, and may ever be). Change is difficult. It's annoying. It's exciting. It's disappointing. It's confusing. It's consuming. It's enthralling. It's whatever we make it to be, or whatever everyone else makes it to be and we get stuck with. It's ridiculous and goodness knows I can't understand it, no matter how intense my love-hate relationship with it is. We apologize if that's not satisfying for you, but it's all we've got.

Geographic structure plays a significant role in the formation of cultural difference. On Thursday, I reminded of perfect evidence—difference between my Nepalese roommate and me. Nepal is the neighboring country of China. Before I met her in International Student Orientation, I thought we should have similar countenances and similar culture. After we met, I found that in spite of being “neighbors”, we are totally different, especially in culture. The languages, architectures and food are distinguished. The similarities between Nepal and China are not that obvious as those between Japan and China, even though Japan and Nepal are both Asian countries nearby China.

The essential cause is Himalaya Mountains. In ancient Nepal and China, the Himalayas were the barrier for Nepalese and Chinese to intermarry, result in the divergent genes and lifestyles of the two neighboring countries. As the civilization started, these highest mountains in the world were the obstruction for Chinese and Nepalese to communicate. Then the two countries with few communications gradually developed different language and architecture style. The gap between two countries enlarged because of the undeveloped transportation and the lack of emphases on learning a foreign culture in the ancient era. In contrast, the connection between Japan and China has never been disrupted during the history of human civilization.

Based on the “geographic cause” argument, in the cosmopolitan age when the transportations are developed and intercultural communications are frequent, will the initially diverse cultures become convergent? I cannot figure it out. Human beings actually never control the tendency of natural and cultural development. Thus, only time will tell. 

[Why do we need an “I”]

In the class, some students brought up that China has the culture of conformity, and with which Chinese people can be in the state without an “I”. Especially during the Culture Revolution, there was no “I” in China. I don’t agree with that opinion. Even during the Culture Revolution, when every one ought to wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and be totally uniform and indistinguishable, there were still lots of people want to be unique and different, and interestingly those people who sought an “I” were educated and were able to think. Those who didn’t need an “I” and completely followed the uniformity were those neither received education nor read books. The ones without their own opinions are more likely to follow others or copy others. It seems that thinking is requisite for the desire of an “I”. Ones don’t need an “I” for they don’t think or they don’t have their own thoughts. But I don’t know if we need an “I” because we think.

[Randomness Again]

I feel that the evolution of culture is the result of a collection of randomness.

Take the expand of Europe as an instance. If there was no compass, if there were no wars in Europe, if Europe had abundant resources, if the Spanish King decided not to support navigations, Europeans may not be the one who expanded. Every condition determines the final result. No one is prior. Randomness is the end of science evolution, and it is the start of the culture evolution. Right now I just have a feeling that the randomness is the connection, but I don't know how to explain it clearly. I think I'll get more inspirations in class to form my final idea.

Something that really resonated with me after thursday's class was paige's idea that we valorize winners (in her case it was how we focused on the English and how they conquered the world). The more I thought about it the more it seemed to be a common idea among the cultures I've seen in my life. For example in Indian culture, or at least my famliy, they are always psuhing to be the best at EVERYTHING and there is no exception.No grey area. You either win or you loose. But you better win.

All throughout my American schooling i've seen parents pushing their kids to always win. When I went to an international school I saw how a majority of the Korean students' parents had started teaching them English, the violin, and math as young children. Those same kids were spending every waking moment in the orchestra pit or in the classroom, with little to no down time. Humans want to, and maybe need to win.

While I know there are exceptions to that declaritive statement above, I've noticed a trend. Especially in my generation of students who are pushing themselves to exhaustion because they just end up juggling too many activies and assignments because they want to be the best.

Although in some cultures this idea of needing to be the best, or win, may not have developed past the stage of friendly competition. The example I'm thinking of is that of the aztecs (i think) who played an ancient version of soccer/basketball where they bounced a rubber ball with different parts of their bodies into stone rings in a court. The players were athletic young treibespeople who had the whole world going for them. After the game the loosers and winner would stand in front of the king and he would choose which team would be sacraficed. You'd think it would be the looers, but not always. Many times it was the winners who were sacrficed. So I guess in this culture, winners aren't always valorized.

 At the end of our class on Thursday, we were discussing whether or not cultural change was intentional, or conscious. We agreed that Civil Rights Movements that caused change were conscious, but couldn't agree as a class whether or not the latest fashion trends were. I can't get this off my mind.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about the nature of conscious or unconscious change, that conscious actions ALWAYS result in unconscious change. That is to say, every conscious action made may effect some premeditated change, but it also necessarily creates unexpected change. When I walk into the classroom, I don't intend to dirty the floor, but it inevitably happens. Or, a cultural example would be the Feminist Movement of the Sixties. The movement created the premeditated change of allowing women into the workplace and out of the homes (read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique for more info). However this movement also created the unexpected "second shift," where women were not only expected to work their paying jobs, but expected to continue assuming all or most of the domestic work as well (Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift).

This line of thought provoked me to remember the saying, "You can never step in the same river twice." I used to comprehend this adage by thinking of the fact that the river is always flowing, so it is always changing. However, in thinking about the idea of conscious and unconscious change, I began reinterpreting this to mean that you necessarily change the river. Perhaps your reason for stepping in the river was to cool off, or perhaps you accidently stumbled into it, but your body necessarily changed the flow, whether you intended it to or not.

Is this making sense?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in thinking of cultural change, I'm beginning to see how some changes are necessarily unintended, or coincidental. I'm not sure that I'm willing to accept them as random (taking "random" to mean that which is without reason), but I am willing to see how small accidents or by-products create huge changes in cultures. Like penicillin and cornflakes.

anne_BMC_cakeday

I am learning to upload photos.

I like taking pictures, and I believe that the highest skill of photographing is to capture the exclusive second in life, esp. in human life. I am used to click several times at a same scene to make sure I get at least one outcome. I don't know if this picture is good or not, but I like the sunshine on Anne. Always in my daydream, the sunshine on someone is a combination of natural power and human soul.But I still love Vampire Diaries, (never mind....).  Capturing one  in a crowd, I am pround of myself.....