The current informative society, promoted with the advancement in technology, has provided possible opportunities to indirectly expereience foreign culture. Nowadays, people no longer need to spend exorbitant airplane ticket price for a world tour, but can easily siton their couch at home to learn other cultures indepth. Although this seemingly profitable opportunity may be advantageous, I personally lieve that it cannot utterly fullfill what can be learned about a foregin culture by actually visiting the country.
First, secondary resources such as books, movies and the internet risks having faulty or exagerated information to attract consumers. Their main focus, unfortunately, is not to deliver realistic depiction of foreign culture, but is often to use sensational topics to be sold. They sometimes lack accurate information, and consumers are unable to entirely understand the culture through simple reading and watching visually. They will eventually be missing the most impressive parts of the culture that can only be acquired from actually being mingled into the culture. My visit to Paris can be used here to elaborate my explanation. Paris, before I had visited the city, was a fascinating country that triggered my imagination. From what I had read through a guidance book, Paris was a fabulous and advanced city with its distinctive culture. However, the reality was different to my high ideals. Paris was unclean, a city of multi ethnic cultures due to colonization and changed my insight of viewing the city. Since then, I realized that secondary sources can only be used as a supplement and not the main source.
Second, what makes learning varying culture more valuable is not from reading or watching but from traveling and spending precious time with one's beloved friends and families. Although it is possible to study about other cultures, it is more significant and memorable to learn from direct experiences. This is the fundamental reason why people are willing to work hard and earn money to visit other countries. How we learn about different countries, infact anything, is not solely from secondary sources reinterpreted by others' perspective. We feel and understand using senses and through experiences we learn more sophisticated information. |