Hi guys! Nice to you see you all again. I hope you guys are doing great 🙂 Last week, I have studied about the cultural diffusion in my mass media and society class and I think it is an interesting topic to write the blog about. As you all know that nowadays we are living in the world of globalization. Everything can easily exchange from place to place even cultures and traditions so no wonder how people are so connected and somehow we have changed the way we live our life. Culture has become fluid and may adapt and change because of new influences. Some might say culture has become more homogenised because of this, while others may say that culture has diversified because of the increased choice and variety.
First of all, we have to know what is the cultural diffusion?
Cultural Diffusion is the spread of cultural trends across locations. Beliefs, practices and ideas get shared from person to person and sometimes even around the world through this diffusion.
To help you guys understand more about the cultural diffusion. Here are some of the examples:
- A Chinatown is an area which full of asian people and asian food is exist all over the world.
- Some people in the United States play hockey, which is played in Canada.
- The spread of music throughout the world shows cultural difussion. For example, jazz started as a blend of the music of Africa and the Caribbean.
- The English language contains many words from other languages.
After I have learned about the cultural diffusion, I came up with a question that as an impact of the cultural diffusion, are tourists come to visit Bangkok because they interested in our traditional culture or the culture that we obtained from other places or countries?
From the my research through the trip advisor’s board, I found out that some of the tourists all over the world recently love to visit our city because they fall in love with the food, shopping malls and night club
It is obvious that the things they love about Thailand are not our traditional culture. Food can be an exception in this case but not with malls and night clubs because it is a invention that we have obtained from other countries. For example, the architecture of most of the malls these days are the European and Western styles. Also the products that selling in the malls are also mainly import from other countries. As same as the night clubs, most of them turn on Western songs which is clearly did not promote our traditional culture.
One of the most popular place that tourists love to visit in Bangkok is Khao Sarn Road. It is known to be must-visited night life place in Bangkok. It is so famous that it described by Alex Garland in his best selling book The Beach as “the centre of the backpacking universe”. Therefore, no wonder why we can find various nations of the tourists in the Khao Sarn Road.
In my opinion, the cultural diffusion brings both benefit and drawback. The advantage of it to travel industry is that all these mixing of cultures attract tourists to travel to our country. It is not hard for the tourists to love these places because it seems different to their home but still have a sense that they can feel connected. However, the drawback of cultural diffusion is that our traditional culture would eventually faded away and the tourists might not pay attention or acknowledge about the beautiful culture of Thailand. Therefore, I think we as a Thai people should promote our own culture to the world as well as obtaining the good things from other cultures. The balance of these two would help creating the good image of our country and help increasing the number of tourist coming to our country as well.
So that is my opinion on this topic. Feel free to share you own. Thank you for reading my blog and see you guys soon!