I wish we did a better job of fostering diversity of views from other places even within the US.I grew up in Columbus, Georgia. I would read fashion magazines and there would be all these articles about layers in fall and what winter coat to buy and which boots were in style and this left me bewildered as to how I was supposed to dress.
It's something I've lamented before: Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.
None of that applied to my life in Georgia. I have joked for years that if you get a single snowflake anywhere in the state of Georgia, they shut down the entire state and declare a state of emergency.
They shut everything down when it snows because it snows so rarely that no one owns snow plows. When I was eight, we got like 18 inches of snow and roofs were collapsing because they aren't sloped enough, most people did not own snow shovels and most people had no idea they should shovel the snow off of their insufficiently sloped roofs.
It gets cold enough for a serious winter coat for like three days out of the year there. Okay, I am making that figure up for humorous effect, but you genuinely do not need serious winter clothes in that part of Georgia the way you do in New York or Germany.
If you own serious winter clothes, you will have few opportunities to wear them. It makes little sense to spend a lot of time and money on buying serious winter clothes there -- assuming you can even find such in the local stores, which you probably can't.
It makes more sense to plan to throw on extra layers for the few days out of the year that it gets seriously cold. Paying attention to winter fashion advice from publications headquartered in New York makes about as much sense as taking fashion tips from Inuit living in igloos in Alaska.
It also makes no sense to pay attention to fashion advice from publications headquartered in California. Los Angeles is not only in a desert, it's where Hollywood is and the way they dress and behave is outrageous by the standards of most Americans. San Francisco isn't any better as a template for most Americans.
But good luck trying to find a local or regional publication with fashion advice pertinent to people living in Georgia. Most fashion publications will be based in either New York or Los Angeles.
Those are the big fashion industry hot spots in the US and the US also participates in Fashion Week in Paris which is probably even more irrellevant to the lives of most Americans than how people in New York and Los Angeles dress. And yet fashion starts there and "trickles down" to the rest of the US and we kind of lack local or regional fashion trends and fashion publications.
That's just one example of many. We also produce a lot of movies, books, music and TV shows in those two locations and I spent much of my life feeling like I was "just doing it wrong" or something because what I was seeing and hearing in various media seemed so disconnected from my life and so unrepresentative of my life.
It took me a long time to realize that a very high percentage of American media does NOT portray "life in America." Instead it portrays "life in either New York city or somewhere in California."
New York is simply not representative of how life works anywhere else in the US, even aside from the fact that New York City is much, much larger than most American cities. We have fifty states and the other forty-nine states have their own rules, laws, etc. that are different from those in New York.
It would be a little like if aliens came down and picked a random city somewhere on the planet and decided that life there represented "human life" everywhere on the planet. And that's not much of an exaggeration because from what I gather we export a lot of media, so Americans are not the only ones soaking up media produced in New York and California as if that media is representative of "human life."
I'm well aware that there is more economic opportunity in bigger cities and more restaurants and more "culture" of various sorts. That has nothing to do with my point.
My point is that too much media "tells" the world how life is in a very short list of places as if that generalizes and it doesn't. And what we watch and listen to is a form of education when it goes well or brain washing when it doesn't.
So most of America is getting "told" we "should" live like this and it's like a coat that doesn't fit and we mostly aren't being explicitly told it needs to be altered to work for us. We are implicitly being told "There must be something wrong with you if that doesn't fit you."
I'm aware of the market forces that help shape the media landscape in this particular manner. I'm aware there is no conspiracy and that the fact that it's due to market forces means there may be no means to remedy it.
But with the existence of the internet, I can't help but feel we ought to be able to do something about this. Though I am not holding my breath.