In the past few weeks, we have been going over urbanization,
how different societies react in their environment, rise of cities and more. I
grew up in a small town; I would say about 6,000 people. My graduation class
was only about 250 students and we all knew each other. I grew up in a type of
town where everyone know who everyone was and what purpose they had to the
town. I enjoyed living this lifestyle because I feel that it brings you close
to the people you surround yourself with, and to have a society run and work
efficiently, you need that bond.
When I went
to college, I meet many different types of people. People who have been in
towns much smaller than mine, one of my closet friends actually to this day
actually grew up in a town where he had only about 500 people living in. But I
also met a lot of people who grew up in the city where the population is well
over 2.5 million people. When you are in college, you realized the many
different types of people there are out there in the world and also start to
notice how all of their lifestyles are completely different than one another’s.
When the book brings up culture shock and how people in different urban/rural
areas live, you can definite
ly see how there could be culture shock.
In small towns, the population
isn’t that big. You have the group of people who work for your public works,
the teachers, law enforcement/safety teams and etc. With a small town, there
are a lot of opportunities to have a purpose in your town. People live to have purpose
and that’s what they strive for. In large cities, such as Chicago, the
population is extremely large and the opportunities to have a purpose in your
city is much more difficult. But, people in the city could live a life, without
any purpose to their city or people and they would be perfectly happy with
that. When you’re in a large city you tend be a follower and follow everyone
else than in small towns where you have to take charge in order to get things
done.
When thinking about culture shock
and how people living in cities can survive if they moved to a small town or if
a small town person moves to a large city, which one would have more of a culture
shock? In my opinion, culture shock will
always happen regardless of what culture you lived in before. When living in a small town, you have a sense
or order and leadership due to the lack of other resources in people you can
rely on. When moving to the city, your responsibility to the city goes down due
to the amount of people resources increasing. You are more pushed to becoming a
follower than a leader. Am I saying you can’t become a leader in a large city,
no but the opportunities to become one are a lot harder. Also, what I haven’t
really mentioned but the geography and the architecture would be a drastic different
as well. From small town to having personal business shops and easy
transportation access to large cities where you have extremely large buildings
with multi million dollar businesses. Also the transportation is a lot more
difficult in large cities than it is in small towns. The city does have more
options to transportation such as taxis, subways, and personal ride carts but
still with the amount of people, its difficult. Now looking into when a person
moving from a large city to a small town, they still experience some culture
shock as well. People, who live in the city, rely on the mass amount of
transportation available like I mentioned earlier to get around to different
places due to how large it is. In small towns you don’t have the luxury of public
transportation so you would have to adapt and either get a car or find other
transportation ways. Also, going from a city where you don’t have to have a
purpose to a small town where your town relies on you to et jobs done could be
a culture shock as well.
In my opinion, culture shock
happens everywhere and it will always happen. People in society are raised to
live a certain way and when you move away from that, there’s going to be some
culture shock. Moving from a small town
to a large city I feel will have the most culture shock because of the mass
amounts of things that are available than a small town would have. I was very
interested in reading about these topics over the past few weeks and am excited
to see what more I learn.
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