Tuesday, 26 October
Journal Entry 21
Module 7
So, before I begin this assignment and the readings, here goes what I know about culture. For me, culture can take many meanings. To begin with, I see culture as the views and understandings held by societies and the individuals within it. The meaning of culture can be understood differently by many, but in my personal regards to the term culture I see it mainly as something that is passed down by previous generations and upheld, for the most part, by future ones.
Personally, culture is what is taught to you growing up by your parents from what they have learned from their parents, etc. Ethnically I am Cuban, and my sister and immediate cousins are the first generation of Cubans in my family to be born in the United States. My father came to the US in his mid-thirties, so the way he was raised was culturally different from today’s ways of living. Regardless of this, I have still witnessed many aspects of our culturally different views in respect to simple things accepted in today’s society which were not accepted (in fact looked down upon) while he was growing up, but are common ways of living today. For example, in the Cuban culture, children and adolescents are not allowed to sleep in other homes other than their own.
Elaborating, the children in the household have to sleep under the roof that they live under and not anyone else’s; as I can still hear him saying in his thick Cuban accent, “this is where you live and therefore where you sleep,” so one can only imagine what it was like not being able to have a slumber party with their friends or have to come home on prom night! In hindsight, I now understand his ways of thinking because while he was growing up, as he explained it, only scandalous woman slept outside of their homes. But in today’s culture, it is very common and barely even questioned. I’m sure raising twin daughters didn’t help the matter either! I think that we learn from those that teach us growing up and develop aspects of their culture, but are also able to modify these beliefs into our own which is what we will then pass down to our children.
Thursday, 28 October
Journal Entry 22
Module 7
Before reading my assigned material for SOW, I really had no clue what it could possibly contain! Obviously, my first impression was how our world and cultures have changed up until now, but I didn’t know what topics exactly it would be covering.
After reading “From Selling Soap to Selling Sustainability: Social Marketing,” it gave me such a different perspective on how our culture has changed regarding how marketing was done in the 1950’s to how it’s done now. Ironically, it has had a huge impact on our culture that I never really ever took into account. As my previous entry talks about culture in general, it can also be related to my article from SOW. As time progresses, people begin to develop different views and opinions on issues. The marketing strategies today play a major impact on that. That’s why I think with every new generation comes new cultural values and ways of looking at things. For example, before corporations changed their marketing technique from delivering facts as their main component, they weren’t profiting as much as they were when World War II was occurring.
Their switch to using human-based stories that could relate to the consumers was what revolutionized social marketing all together. It’s changes like this that cause people to develop new beliefs. My opinion hasn’t really changed regarding culture after reading my chapter in SOW. It’s the progression and development of our society that causes newer generations to take a different aspect on culture altogether and the values and beliefs handed down to us from our parents and society will always take a different outlook on it.
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