13547 Culture
TOEFL Independent Writing Task
Essay Topic: A Single Global Culture
Sample Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh
Essay Question (TOEFL Topic/Official List 185):
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Modern technology is creating a single world culture. Use specific reasons and examples (from your knowledge or experience) to support your answer.
Example Writing (Jeenn Lee Hsieh):
Although modern technology is moving cultures around the world closer together, the result should not exactly be a single global culture. Goods move and people move and ideas move beyond borders; so much so, diversified cultures tend to mix on a global scale, but are far from being uniform. In general, it is not that cultures necessarily agree with each other, but rather that they understand each other.
Creating a single world culture is neither a reality nor a choice. Cultures (old and new and far and wide) have mixed and changed, only to find that they cannot agree with each other in at least some key respects. To illustrate, even in this Information Age, what seems to be technologically possible, may actually be religiously or morally not acceptable. It is true that cultures of more developed countries reach virtually everyone, thanks particularly to television, radio, the Internet and other media outlets. Nevertheless, it does not mean that the technology-based culture is gaining the ground around the world, if only referring to religious beliefs as well as moral standards. Of course, mainstream cultures may transform each other to a certain extent, and yet this phenomenon is nothing new and nothing like a global single culture.
Now that the entire world is electronically connected, people of different cultures are able to better understand each other, as if people from other places were living in the backyard. Perhaps in outlook, it appears to be a single world sharing popular music, fashions, moves, dancing, and even drinks and foods. However, of all aspects of culture, no example is more dramatic in promoting international understanding than the English language. Exactly, this is a case in point to show that not all cultures need to agree with each other, even if they all speak the same language and make themselves understood. But will modern technology that moves cultures so fast and so pervasively will kill other major languages like Chinese or Spanish? Certainly not!
All in all, modern technology is playing the role of creating a shifting mixture of cultural experimentation and innovation in which more and less developed societies learn and benefit mutually. In the end, the cultures that survive will be those which are willingly able to embrace different cultures on their own terms. So, the bottom line is that there is no such thing as a single world culture, but a modern culture is usually in more diversity. (Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh)
