Essay Sample on Culture & Ageism: How They Shape Our Lives & Future

Introduction

Depending on where a person comes from, there are various ways of life that they get exposed to and as they develop in the various stages of life, these ways of life that they get exposed to become a part of them and largely influences the kind of person that they become in future. Culture may be identified as a way of life in which the individuals involved conform to this life approach leading to the development of a group of people united by a way of life i.e. culture.

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Ageism is a term used to refer to the discrimination or the stereotyping of groups or individuals based on their age. According to Butler, ageism is defined as a combination of three connected elements which include the prejudicial attitudes towards the ageing process, older people as well as old age, institutional policies and practices that preserve stereotypes concerning the older people as well as the discriminatory practices against the old individuals (Doron and Georgantzi, 2018). The term is also used to refer to the discrimination and prejudice against children and adolescents such as ignoring ideas of adolescents or children since they are considered too young, denying the certain young rights as well as the assumption that the young should behave in specific ways based on their age (Nelson, 2016). This paper tries to explain how ageism and identity impact how young individuals relate to the elder or people in the society.

The concept of culture is one of the broadly used notions in sociology. Culture can be presumed to be equivalent to higher mind things such as literature, art, painting, and music. Culture refers to the way of life of a society or of groups within a community. It refers to the way people dress, family life and language, marriage custom, religions ceremonies, leisure pursuits, and patterns of work. There is a close connection between culture and society, although culture can be conceptually separated from society. A community can be defined as a system of interrelationships that bring people together. Unique culture is what connects individuals in a society organizing them in structured social relationships, which means that no culture would exist without community. Equally, no organization would exist without a culture.

Identity, on the other hand, has many conceptual counterparts that equivalent to it or precede it. The theoretical colleagues include self-awareness, identification and individual awareness. These counterparts are almost equivalent, for if they are not, there would be no sense of using them. Issues such as ego, self, worldview, and soul are related to identity. Identity can hence be defined as the complicated relationship between an individual's consciousness and the world, between subjective and objective, between ideal and real, culture and nature, spiritual and material, external and inner (Cote, and Levine, 2014). The age sociology offers an analytical background for understanding the relationship between social structure changes and human lives. Age sociology is more focused on the later years of life, although it should be grounded in the process of growing up and growing old. To understand the concept of age, one has to evaluate the entire course of life. This paper hence examines the idea of culture, identity, and age regarding sociological approaches.

The young people in today's society have adopted certain behaviors which are different from how the young people in the past few decades behaved. There are five social influences which have played a more significant role in how the young people behave today, and these influences include the new technology specifically the cell phones, television, video games as well as computers, the media, punishment or the lack of discipline, divorces as well as poverty (Torres, 2016. 3). All the above factors play a more significant role in affecting how the children of today are being raised, also influenced their capacities to deal with their daily lives and futures. The influences affect the behaviors of young people either positively or negatively, and the main reason for this is because, in the course of the last generation, there have been a lot of changes that have occurred in the way households work, the way of parenting, how technology has advanced as well as the way the media is being portrayed.

There was a time when the graffiti culture was perceived as being a crime or a sign of criminals but these stereotypes have changed very quickly in the present day. In the course of the past generation, graffiti was thought to be a mess which made cities and towns look badly-maintained or untidy however it's essential to think about graffiti in today's society and how it influences the lives of young people in the current society. Graffiti is an art which is mostly painted on walls as well as public places. It can vary from a small tag such as the name of a person on a wall to a huge mural that covers the entire wall (Romero and Manzanares, 2019. 100). Today's young people have highly adopted the graffiti culture, and even it has become a source of income to many youths today.

The graffiti often usually has a political or social message that it shows through words or pictures or both. This can be seen through the clear signals that the famous British artist known as Banksy displays when he creates the street-art. In other countries such as the United Kingdom, graffiti is illegal, and people are usually fined a lot of money when found decorating public property. In other countries such as Colombia, the culture has become popular despite being illegal. The young people believe that if there is a blank wall, then this means that an artist has the right to decorate it using graffiti (Thompson, 2019). In Colombia, for example, despite being illegal, the graffiti culture is prevalent, and it usually represents the indigenous people as well as a culture through its still viewed as vandalism in the eyes of the law.

Another culture that has had a more significant impact in society today is the skateboard culture. It's essential to think of how to skateboard culture has influenced the community today and mainly why it has had the impact. Skateboarding is a type of sport like no other. The skateboard culture today has changed the way people talk, the fashion today as well as the music of today. The main reasons why the skateboard culture is famous mainly among the youths is because, in skateboarding, there are no rules and no teams, the youths of today love to be free from all the rules and they love to do what they think best fits them with less or no control by another individual including their parents (Willing et al. 2019. 512).

This might be the main reason that this culture attracts the attention of many youths today. When an individual skate well, this means that everyone wins and the good thing with skating is that it can be done almost anywhere. Most people prefer doing it in the streets while others have skateparks where they go. Skaters are usually free to do all the tricks and skate; however; they want to without being influenced by other players (Beal, 2019). There is independence, free-thinking mentality as there are no rules hence attracting most of the young people in today's society who like to do their own thing. It requires a lot of energy which happens to be one of the key requirements that the young people possess; hence they are fit for it.

The mind of young people today is very creative and very sharp, and these qualify them to engage in activities such as skateboarding and to become graffiti artists. The two cultures are famous among the young people since they have all the qualifications to fit in the cultures hence making the two cultures part and parcel of today's perception among the young people. It is believed that the cultures are for the young since they have all that is required to be in these cultures. This social construction of identity and age plays a great role in determining how and why the youths live the way they live. This means that most youths employ the graffiti culture and the skateboarding culture because the two cultures are grouped to be suitable for young people and fits any young individual anywhere across the globe.

The internalized nature of identity is emphasized in the context of stable self-structure, which is nested on the concept of the self and the self-concept. The self is a concept that is created by the reflexive action of the human mind that stems from the interaction with other individuals. To better understand this issue, one should imagine themselves from the standpoint of another person. Identity has two components, which include the "I" and the "me." The "I" refer to the novel, dynamic, and spontaneous aspect of the self that consists of persons as actors and knowers. The "me" refers to the learned perspective of an individual towards their attitudes, especially when taking up the role of another. There are four fundamental concepts of identity characterization, which include individual or personal identity, category-based identity, role-based identity, and group membership-based identity. However, own identity is the most essential, and it is defined as the social classification of a person into a category of one. An example includes: I am Alice smith, spouse to Edward smith. I was born in Miami, my dad has a cousin named Samuel. I was a soldier in the Vietnam War. The unique identifiers in personal identity are institutional and social. By such, soldiers are identified and differentiated from others by name, rank, and serial numbers. Such distinctions are organized and created by the institutions in which they happen.

The concepts of culture, identity, and age have been identified to be created by the social aspect of humans. Culture refers to the way of life for people in the society. The concept of culture is intertwined, meaning that no culture would exist without the community, and no society would exist without culture. The need to identify oneself drives people to classify with a society and to better understand the concept of identity, one should try and put themselves in the standpoint of other people. The unique identifiers in individual identity are institutional and social. Different people act differently to verify their conception of who they are. In such a case, a scientist would act in a way that proves to her and others that they are logical, careful, experimental, and analytically inclined. The concept of age is also socially constructed, meaning that there is no cultural meaning of aging that is related to the process of aging. The varies ideas related to aging across the world confirm that age is a social construction, which means that age is a concept created by a group of people, making the idea to be perceived differently in different groups of people.

Reference List

Beal, B., 2019. Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding.

Doron, I.I. and Georgantzi, N., 2018. Introduction: between law, ageing and ageism. In Ageing, Ageism and the Law. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Nelson, T.D., 2016. Ageism.

Romero, A.P. and Manzanares, D.M., 2019. Historical graffiti and mass culture. A vision from the Public Archaeology. AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology, 8(1), pp.95-106.

Thompson, S., 2019. Graffiti Yarn: Politics, Art, and Contemporary Culture.

Torres, S., 2016. Aging, Ageism, and Gender. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, pp.1-5.

Willing, I., Bennett, A., Piispa, M. and Green, B., 2019. Skateboarding and the 'tired generation': Ageing in youth cultures and lifestyle sports. Sociology, 53(3), pp.503-518.