Divitaen wrote:New Granadeseret wrote:Because every aspect of every culture does; things imported from abroad is essentially the same as something new being invented at home. Because that's how you get people's attention. Delving deep into the culture and history of a thing is work, and people aren't willing to put forth the effort for something they have no reason to care anything about. You ever wonder why there's a brief description and cover art on books? It's so it can catch people's attention and give them enough information to convince them to actually go through and read the whole thing. Should just wanting to read the first page obligate me to read the entire series? Would anybody every develop an interest in, say, engineering if your required them to take a university course before they were even allowed to tinker with their first hobbist woodworker kit? (A 'children's toy' as you put it?) I bet any amateur you put that ultimatum before would drop the idea faster then if you'd just stayed out of the way and let him take his own course.
Furthermore, a "corporate consumer culture" is designed to sell things. It panders to consumers by it's very definition. If you want to make a change, that starts by changing the minds of the masses... and to do that you have to give them a reason to give two bits about what it is you're fighting for in the first place. And your demand that they either be avente gardee or nothing at all means your base of support is going to be small.
I don't think it will eventually change my minds though. The result is you just have an extremely large consumer base, all convinced that the entire culture is represented by a few toys, some cool TV shows and a few neat tricks, but refuse to go further than that. And to have cultural appropriation on a mass scale doesn't make this any better. I'm not asking everyone to go to university, but at the very least companies and organisations shouldn't sell out for the sake of appealing to mass consumerism.
Companies not selling out t mass consumerism for money... yah, not going to happen. Making money is their reason for existence, and they have no motivation to shut off the flow. The change has to come from the consumers voting with their wallets to go elsewhere... and that won't happen if you close the gates to any interaction with a culture (to see if they'd even be curious about it or not) by outsiders unless they go through a great deal of work beforehand.
There are two ways you can counter the 'degradation' of culture. Your approach seems to be circling he wagons to maintain purity; which of course will result in nobody outside caring about it and will be gladly negligent towards it's upkeep, while you only get new supporters through 'natural birth' into it (many of whom will be lead away by the appeal of other, more open cultures), only slowing the decay.
The other option is to get supporters and strength from the outside by allowing for slow entry and fair, honest competition on the trans-cultural stage. Make the information available in interesting ways... even if they aren't one-hundred percent, every minute detail included levels of accuracy and scale. They, others think this might be interesting and have a motivation to look into it, possibly becoming a partial or even full convert. A certain level of lowest-common-denominator is a less fortunate, but unavoidable, aspect of this, but you're not much (if any) worse off losing somebody that you never had in the first place.
lol