GRE Analyze an issue-Please grade my essay

[jasmina]

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

Recently, many people complain about how country music has gotten stale and generic, how the artists are recycling old songs and how the genre is lacking creativity. While the genre effectively needs to deploy more efforts into innovating, the decline in country music is symptomatic of another issue: the shift in taste in today’s youth. They simply favor Hip-hop, Pop and Electronic Dance Music.

And while it’s a safe bet that studying culture as it manifests itself in music, visual arts and religion is most effectively done by studying the trends in youth, claiming that these trends are our best option into gaining insight about contemporary culture is at best wishful thinking since some aspect of today’s culture has proven over and over to pass the test of time and the experimentation of the youth. 

Like music, other aspects of contemporary culture are an acquired taste and depend on the new technologies to reshape them. And a closer look into today’s youth trends are a good indicator to their new direction. Visual arts, for example, have evolved from their static forms as paintings and sculptures and embraced the new technologies. Nowadays most people express themselves through new applications like Instagram and snap chat and tell their daily emotions and experiences through these forms of visual arts. Instagram stars have more followers than museum attendees and snap chat tells more stories than portraits and paintings. This shift has created a culture of social media and the appreciation of conventional arts is diminishing every day. The new visual masterpiece has ceased to be the Mona Lisa’s smile and has become some star’s latest cover picture.

In the same way, new studies found that more than 20% of American youth are atheists. This trend explains why most of the traditional religious values in the American culture have been replaced by more liberal value. Unlike the early 20^th century, contemporary culture is based on the sexual liberation and the freedom to decide one’s fate without social and religious pressure. This trend explains why our culture is based less on religious values and more on moral ones.

However, despite the fact that the youth shape most aspect of the contemporary culture, other aspects defy trends and pass the test of time, take literature for example, while the latest trends in young adults are to read romantic vampire novels, it turns out that these trends life span doesn’t exceed the novel’s life span and the time needed to produce a movie based on it. Most young adults still prefer and appreciate classical literature and no matter how viral a werewolf novel goes, it still doesn’t produce enough enthusiasm to reshape what we think of as good literature. Similarly, fashion trends come and go without making a huge effect on the way we wear clothes, on what is acceptable as business wear and what is frowned upon to be worn by women. Huge efforts by pioneer women were needed to change how women dress and how some cultures had to reshape themselves to include these changes.

In short, contemporary culture is too broad of a concept to be affected just by the youth’s trends. Although Some aspects of it would always be susceptible to the young’s will, others take generations if not centuries to be formulated and trends alone would not suffice to change them.