How does Culture Change within Society?

Society as a whole has seven pillars. These areas are Education, Media, Arts & Entertainment, Government, Family, Religion and Business.

The Tipping Point, explains that a tipping point is “the biography of an idea and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of a crime wave, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.”

In essence, a tipping point is when something that is not so unusual becomes an unusual catalyst to cause a major shift or change as a result of that tipping point.

Randall Collins explains that culture is defined by the adoption of values and beliefs in four main competing networks:

• Military

• Economic

• Political

• Cultural

It is the cultural network that is the most important of the four. It is made up of Education, Arts & Entertainment and Media. It is deemed the most important because this is where society defines values and beliefs. As values are expressed through movies, media, education and the arts, it is adopted, often subconsciously, by those who view these messages on an ongoing basis. If the messages that are being communicated are anti-biblical in nature, it is only time before the “frog in the kettle” realizes the temperature is too hot and dies. He does not recognize the subtle change in temperature until one day it is too late. Unless those in the culture understand the messages that are being communicated and seek to alter those messages, then culture will be changed by whoever chooses to influence using the media avenues available to them.

Randall Collins, a sociologist and author of Discovery of Society