We all need to escape cultural ‘bubbles’

By Jerry H. Gill

To borrow and paraphrase a line from the Beatles, “we all live in a cultural bubble.”

This is quite natural and even necessary. We are born into a particular family and place at a specific time. As we begin to grow into full human persons, we are shaped by the factors making up our individual “bubble,” such as our family, close relatives, friends and teachers.

These factors serve as the loom on which our early life patterns are woven. They provide the context that gives our lives structure and also confine us. Thus it is important that we all learn how to continually move “beyond the bubble” in which we find ourselves.

As we grow toward maturity, we participate in a variety of sub-cultures and larger processes that shape, define and confine us.

Sixty years ago my generation, like all previous generations, grew up waiting for the day we could move into the adult world. Young people essentially had no world of their own. We danced to the same music as adults and looked forward to someday getting married, raising a family and finding work in an established job market. Some of us even followed the socio-political developments taking place across the country, as well as around the world. Nonetheless, we were living in a sub-culture created and maintained by adults.

Most of that changed with the coming of the 1960s, when young people began to have their own music, fashions and lifestyles. Today, young people are preparing for jobs that did not even exist a few years ago, let alone for previous generations.

Obviously, many young people find these changes liberating and challenging. However, they often do not realize they are still living and operating within the confines of a sub-culture created and manipulated by others.

Previous generations lived in anticipation of participating in the adult world. The current generation for the most part is oblivious to the fact that they live in a sub-culture created by other people who seek to manipulate young people for their own profit.

Three of the major factors comprising the sub-culture bubble that most young people live in are: (1) the pop culture of rock music and its stars, fantasy movies and novels, and the electronic world of cell phones, videos and the Internet, (2) the world of fashion, including clothes, body decorations and cars, and (3) the perpetual search for romance and sexual experience.

Within the last decade or so, young people have become virtually addicted to the world created by these influences. They have essentially shut out the larger world beyond the confines of their own immediate interests, including such things as world politics, economics, foreign cultures, the natural world and even spirituality.

As a teacher watching and interacting with today’s college students, I am astounded, both by the degree to which they are continuously tied to their cell phones or iPods and by the almost complete lack of any reference to the world outside of their immediate cultural bubble.

They seem unable to live without their phone messaging. When they do talk with each other, for the most part they are limited to the details of their personal lives or those of the current “American idols.”

They do not realize they are caught in a narcissistic bubble that is largely tangential to what really matters in the rest of the world. Even our classroom work often seems irrelevant to and disconnected from the lives of many, if not most, students.

What young people need to know in order to break out of this “youth culture” trap, in order to grow beyond the bubble that confines them to an extremely limiting quality of life, is that this essentially fantasy world is created and maintained by people who are driven by selfish profit motive.

They have been told that they are “unique,” “special” and “free” individuals by those who wish to sell them an unending supply of “cool” clothes, discs and foods, even as they are being fed and sold an ongoing stream of commodities that are essentially the same.

It becomes imperative for them to purchase the latest multi-tasking phone, line of “distinctive” clothes and hottest DVDs or videos, while their suppliers rake in the profits.

In “The Wall,” Pink Floyd gave us the line, “We don’t need no education, we don’t want no mind control.” If young people today want to avoid the sort of mind control their current cultural bubble imprisons them in, they had better get an education, and a good one at that.

This, of course, goes for those of us in the so-called “adult world” as well, since our lives too are also largely controlled by the designs of those running commercial enterprises at the highest levels, including the mass media and the professional lobbyists.

We all need continually to force ourselves beyond the imprisonment of our particular cultural bubbles and try to see the broader reality all around us.

One of the most difficult aspects of teaching young people today is trying to get them to think and speak sequentially. From “Sesame Street” on, young people have been presented with snips of images and sounds that are for the most disconnected from one another. Even the previews for films are so disjointed that one has little idea what the movie is actually about.

Many of my students are unable to write a coherent paragraph dealing with a single topic, let alone a three-page essay developing it. They often do not know how to ask about the presuppositions and implications of a given idea, or how to analyze its meaning.

Years ago, in a “Peanuts” cartoon, Linus comes home from kindergarden and exclaims that he had a grand day at school because they learned to place one block on top of another. He says: “I never would have thought to put one block on top of the other.”

I often share this with my students in order to explain what is meant by “sequential thinking.” One learns to place one block, or idea, on top of, or after, another so that the building process makes sense and holds together.

By learning how to actually think, we can all grow beyond our particular cultural bubbles.

Moreover, it should be clear that this sort of thinking involves both listening to and reflecting on the thoughts of those around us, no matter their age, gender or culture. Ultimately, we think best when we think together.

Jerry Gill is a Pima Community College adjunct instructor of humanities, philosophy and religion.