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The Negative Influences of Western Culture to Indonesian Culture

Culture is the one of important things for the nation. It’s not only as a symbol of country’s identity but also has deep meaning and important function for certain country. It can show the characters and identity of certain country. Every country or region has their own culture. Indonesian and western also has their own culture.  However, because of globalization Western cultures influenced Indonesian culture in many aspects greatly. The influences have been impacted for Indonesian people especially for teenager’s life. Western culture causes many negative effects in several aspects such as lifestyle, entertainment and sport.

First, the number of free sex in Indonesia is increasing. Life together without marriage often happened commonly for the teenagers. They think that free sex is something common for nowadays. They have forgotten and leave about eastern culture rules and norm that they should used. They imitate what western people do without consider which is good or bad. They only think and follow something that can make them happy. There is no reason for them to not do free sex although they have known that free sex is very dangerous and often get victims. Another example is about style and fashion. Indonesian teenagers prefer to imitate western, start from hair until how dress up. As we know, Indonesian teenagers would rather coloring hair and wear unsuitable dress like an actor and actress that does not suitable with eastern norm. They think that is fashionable without thinking which is appropriate or not.

The second aspect that had been influenced by western culture is art. As example, almost all Indonesian teenagers know One Direction or Justin Bieber. Both of them are very popular on Indonesian teenagers. They really love them. They can sing One Direction’s song or cover Justin’s dance well. However, when we ask them about Indonesian traditional music and dance, almost all of them did not know about that. Actually, Indonesia has so many beautiful traditional music and dance such as Keroncong, Tari Pendet, Tari Serimpi and etc. Indonesian teenagers thought that Indonesia traditional art is very old-fashion. They prefer to learn and consume western art than Indonesian traditional art. That is danger alarm for Indonesia. Slowly, Indonesian traditional art will disappear and extinct if the generation did not want to keep and save Indonesian traditional art.

Prefer Using English than Bahasa Indonesia. Look at the teenagers, they prefer to used English as their favorite language than Bahasa Indonesia. In daily life, they would rather mix Bahasa Indonesia with English as their communication language with their friends or colleague. They adopted English into Bahasa Indonesia. Moreover, English become favorite language, it can be seen on so many student that learn English study program in many universities. As we know, some universities only used English and American literary works in literary critism. The term ‘’love because habit” will make the student prefer read English literary works than Indonesian literary works. Slowly, they will forget their culture and that is danger alarm for Indonesia, because as Indonesian people, actually we don’t know our culture and our own country history exactly.

In conclusion, Western culture had influenced Indonesian culture in several aspects to be westernized. The influences of western culture have many bad effects for Indonesian people especially for teenager. As Indonesian, we should know that western culture is very different with eastern culture. We must be wise to filter the influences that brought by western culture. Not all culture from western is suitable and good to imitate. If we would like to imitate, we should consider which is appropriate or inappropriate for our culture. Besides that, as Indonesian, start to love our own culture and learn all the history, norm or eastern culture’s rules which could guard us from external life like western culture.