Living Trend of Young People in Vietnam free essay sample

Then, the business model of internet coffee shop started spreading all over the country and this was the time when Vietnamese young people were able to access to the internet. Internet has brought Western culture into Vietnam and changed the lifestyle of Vietnamese, especially the young people. In recent years, there is a growing tendency of young people living following a trend. In this essay, I would like to discuss further about this new problem of Vietnamese society. Living following a trend can be understood as that fashion, hobbies, behaviors and even feelings are affected by a trend existed in the society. In Western countries, subcultures have existed for quite a long time and become familiar with everyone. As internet appeared, these subcultures also entered Vietnam along with the music and fashion. Immediately, it created a huge wave of changing in the young people then. For example, 2007 was the year that emo really became a part of life that was admited by young people. We will write a custom essay sample on Living Trend of Young People in Vietnam or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Emo represents â€Å"a style of rock music characterized by melodic musicianship and expressive, often confessional lyrics; it originated in the mid-1980s hardcore punk movement of Washington, D. C† (Wikipedia). From a style of music, there was a lifestyle created. Young people, who follows the emo lifestyle, are called â€Å"emo kids†. They are usually highly emotional and have pesimistic view of life, they form groups and come together to express their feelings, share stories and even cry together. Emo kids are easily recognized with dark heavy eye make-up, dark deep black lips, colorful hair colors and lots of rings. In some countries such as Russia or Canada, there are now some emo group being very popular. However, when emo came to Vietnam, its nature was not well kept. Only a small part of emo-ers in Vietnam is naturally emotional and in need of sharing feelings, while the larger main part is known because of their ridiculous overeactions. Back then in 2007, there was limited resources for young people to get knowledge and update information about the world, so emo easily became a hot trend because of its strong impression and being an emo kid can quickly make one popular and well-known. But the dangerous thing happened then was that a large number of young people started to think being an emo kid was the definitely right thing to do and they wanted to prove their maturity by living like an emo kid. It was either good or bad, only the inside could understand. At the same time, some other subcultures, mostly from America, also entered Vietnam and became popular, such as Rap – Hip hop, Yuppie, Skateboarder or Punk Rock. These subcultures have been popular for a long time and created a new way of living and behavioring of young people. However, it is necessary to differentiate between these subculture and the living trend. Subculture means â€Å"segments of culture which (while reflecting the dominant aspects of the main culture) show different customs, norms, and values, due to differences in geographical areas or (within an organization) departmental goals and job requirements† (Business Dictionary) while the living trend discussed in this essay reflects the short-term orientation of life due to specific reasons and may be eradicated or replaced by other orientations soon. As rated on the Internet, the followings are the hottest trends of young people which are most concerned by the society. 1. â€Å"Aped and copied† lifestyle Nowadays, young people are having a much easier life compared to their parents, but also life is more complicated and full of temptation that easily make young people fall in and totally atracted to a special or unique lifestyle to prove themselves. A few years ago, a kind of measurement was â€Å"invisibly† formed among young people in order to evaluate people. It means that you have to use expensive and modern mobile phones, wear luxurious clothes and be a billionaire of time and money. This is still model of good living in youth at present, and it may be the reason why Vietnamese are considered as pragmatic. The fact above is only one of the living model that young people are addicted to. As a whole, all the copied lifestyle of young people came from the Korean movies which were extremely famous in the 1990s and 2000s but were mostly spreaded out by famous young people. The prevalence of the Internet and espcially the advent of social network created an environment in which young people can freely show their personality and feelings. Therefore, beautiful talented boys and girls were discovered and their word had profound influence on other young people’s cognitive. They quickly got a large number of fan and followers, so their lifestyle can partly direct the young’s lifestyle. This can be seen as minority influence that small number of people in a group lead to overall change in the group. On the other hand, adapting Western culture while being affected by Eastern culture makes young people stuck in a difficult situation. The nature of youth is to express and define themselves, they want to be different from others but also want to keep themselves in the society. Hence, they simply copy others’ lifestyle so they can be different (from other groups of people) and identical (to their groups) at the same time. Researched pointed out that culturre strongly impact the social influence on people. And people in collectivistic countries have strong belief in fitting in and conforming to the social norms, which can be seen as signs of maturity and self-control (Markus Kitayama, 1994). Despite being influenced by Western culture for almost 100 years of war, Vietnamese culture still remain the basics of a collectivistic culture. So the young people can not be totally blamed on because they easily follow a trend, it is partly because of the complex culture exchange happening in Vietnam. 2. Living with big ego Desire of self-expression is also known as a typical characteristic of young people. To prove their â€Å"self†, that â€Å"self† must be totally different from others’ â€Å"self† first, so a lot of young people are struggling to find a way to define their â€Å"self† clearest. While others use study results or their talents to prove themselves, many do it in negative ways. As Facebook now is the most common social network in Vietnam, it is not hard to find thousands of article criticizing young people who â€Å"over† express themselves on Facebook. Photos of girls in sexy posture or with just little clothes to show their body are not strange to the netizens at all. And there is even a movement of posting videos of girls’ scrimmage. It also points out that violence tends to increase among the young people. And things became extremely serious due to a scandal on Facebook recently. A Facebook user with nick nam â€Å"Keo mut choi boi† (the nick name can be understood as â€Å"dissipated lollipop† in English) posted a status on his timeline to proudly announce the death of a 60-year-old man in a traffic accident that was made by him. This case received lots of concern from the society because this is the red alert of the rising violence trend among young people. Besides, it is not rare to see a status talking bad about parents or elders in the family. The most well-known case is related to the Korean idols wave that atracted a large number of young people. Some famous Korean idols, such as Super Junior, Girl’s Generation and Bi Rain, came to Vietnam and held their concerts. However, the ticket price was quite expensive to Vietnamese so not all the fan could afford it. Then, there was kind of a trend of disappointed fans depreciating and talking bad about their parents on the Internet because of not letting them go to the concert. Since Vietnamese culture highly value the piety of children, this case created a shock to the whole society. These two cases are only a very small part of the whole picture of young people’s cognitive at present. Though, we can still feel the danger of losing traditional values and believes from the hands of future generations. Young people now are decisive and dare to try new things, but they are lack of experience and maturity. They love their big ego so much that advice from others are hard to reach their mind. By the way, because of their big ego, they usually see themselves better than others. There is a phenomenon, known as false uniqueness bias, shows people’s tendency to see themselves as especially talented and better than others. This happens quite often to the young people. But on the bad side, they give themselves the right to look down on people coming from the country side, the disability or the poor. The distinction between people from rural and urban area even let to conflict between students. 3. Cognitive distortion about sexual orientation Homosexuality has not been totally accepted by Vietnamese and it is still opposed by the laws. This is a new definition and new situation to Vietnamese society. People are fighting to help homosexuality to be admitted and legal in Vietnam. As some organization supporting homosexuality appeared, many people had courage to recognize and confirm their real gender and others seem to not oppose it as much as in the past. This can be considered as a good signal to the society. However, some young people turn it to a new trend of reconfirm sexual orientation. As we all know, beside homosexual (lesbian and gay), there are bisexual (people who are romantically and physically attracted to members of both sexes) and asexual (people who may not be interested in sex but still feel emotionally close to other people). They are called LGBT. Being a LGBT person is not a bad thing, most medical experts believe that, in general, sexual orientation is not something that a person voluntarily chooses, instead, it is just a natural part of who a person is (Sexual Attraction and Orientation). Because LGBT is considered as abnormal so LGBT people are usually afraid of showing their real sexual orientation, especially in Vietnam. However, there is a rising number of young people aggressively admiting being a LGBT and continuosly repeating that. It can not be assumed that all of them are not real LGBT, but it may be concluded that most of them are having wrong cognition about sexual orientation. This wrong cognition often happens to girls because lesbians are easier accepted than gay in Vietnam. But it is also because of the common thought among young people that lesbians are so hot and special. It can be found easily many articles about two female idols kissing and upload their photos on Facebook, this may be only a way to increase their popularity but it does affect young people’s thought. Besides, with the same reason as the copied lifestyle, many girls want to define them as having a different gender from others, which make them special and excellent. Even though, in fact, there are many cases that young people considered themselves as LGBT because of the external environment. In Vietnam, high school students are divided into classes based on the subjects they will take in the university entrance exam. So, there are a lot of class with all female students or only a few males. Although a person’s genes and inborn hormonal factors play most important role in defining sexual orientation, the environmental factors do have effect. Teenage is absolutely a sensitive period because the sexual orientation is not really clear, teenagers may have feelings with friends having same gender but it does not mean that they are LGBT. Moreover, there are two favorite fashion trends called tomboy (girls dress boys’ clothes and look like boys) and unisex (boys and girls dress clothes which is suitable for both gender and it is hard to know that is a boy or a girl). Because these trends are so popular that many girls want to transform into a boys. Along with the lack of knowledge about sexual orientation, tomboy girls easily act as they are lesbian and even get encouragement from friends. Although they are actually not LBGT, they get used to it and can not get back to be straight. Pretending to be LBGT is likely to happen less to boys. But in some cases, the fake gays still exist. It can be assured that their mental are badly influence and the main culprits here are the depraved products. Although environment now is an important factors that affect young people cognition of sexual orientation, people still tend to make fundamental attribution errors and underestimate the role of external factors. Although three living trends seem to be harmful to the young people, there are still many other trends that encourage them to live better. We may find out the voluntary trend all across the country, or the trend of green living – cut off carbon use in everyday meals, and etc But it is still a sad story that these useful and good trends do not attract as much care as the harmful ones. We have to admit that from apperance to behavior, everything in the youth’s life is running after the trend. This trend-following lifestyle both good and bad sides, so it is hard to tell this is harmful or not to the future generations. Nevertheless, the harmful lifestyles need to be studied carefullly and hopefully we may eradicate them in the near future. Except some specific reasons been explain above, there are some identical factors that let those lifestyles spread widely. Firstly, we can not denied the strong tendency to conform of Vietnamese. Although young people want to be unique, it seem that actually they want to be â€Å"unique together†. That may sound weird, but we can easily see that no lifestyles including only one or few people, young people follow that lifestyles and take into account that action because others do so. It might be immature but they just want to be identical to others so they feel it ok to do even bad things. Secondly, there a widening gap among generations. Vietnam is a country highly appreciating traditional values and believes so it is very hard for elders to understand their children. It is not only the result of different thinking but also the difference in technology that the older can not access to what their children are accessing to. Since the older do not have much experience with the Internet or social networks, it is hard for them to give advice to their children how to deal with problems they may face up with. Thirdly, it is absolute that ebulience and immaturity are two things that everyone has to face in their youth. When people get older, they may find their youth funny or even ridiculous, but everyone has to go over it to grown up. We can not eradicate it but can help prevent bad results by advices and education. Last but not least, the most serious problem Vietnam is facing is the old-fashion educatioin system. Although the government has update the education program several times, it can be seen clearly that what students learn in school nowadays is not enough for them to keep up to the world. Started with sexual orientation and sex, young people still make mistakes because they did not get enough knowledge from school. In high schools, students are asked to learn for the university entrance exam, and it results in the lack of soft skills, surviving skills and knowledge of other fields of life, such as history or geography. Though we can find out the factors leading to wrong awareness in following a living trends, it will take a long time to change things. We can not built a skyscraper without a solid foundation. Vietnamese society put all the hope and responsibility of developing the country on the young’s shoulders but it appear that we are having so many internal problems that prevent the development of young people. As people are more strongly influenced by negative traits compared to the positive ones (trait negativity bias), actions must be taken promptly before more young people getting into this problems.