IMAGE OF INDONESIA: CULTURES

Indonesia is pretty well known about its animals, plants and cultural diversity in the world. Recently, indonesian cultures such as traditional dances, has been known, learned, and has gained popularity around the world. For example gamelan, it has been taught in several art universities in Japan and disseminated, or angklung, which has been performed in front of americans, british, japanese and other peoples in different nationalities. But, as the technology continues to develop, young generation have found their kind of interests, which is, for instance, gadgets, and some of them may had already forgotten about their own country's cultures.

Based on my research, most of my friends know about indonesian heritages well, but they do not apply them in their life, also they do not know how to perform those cultures, such as saman or angklung. Efforts that they do in order to protect indonesia's heritages? About less than half of 20 people prefer to do and learn traditional dances and instruments of indonesia. The others still haven't done anything significant in order to learn and spread indonesian cultures.

We can not deny that many Indonesians, especially the teenagers, even 'leave' their own cultures and fall into modern technology. It is somehow a big irony if we compare them to the other countries, many of them had started learning Indonesian cultures. In my view, this is caused by three dominating aspects, development of modern technology, less knowledge about the cultures themselves and lack of nationalism. If this problem continues, other countries may end up stealing our cultures.

Conclusively, as an Indonesian, we should protect our country, heritages and anything related to it and must not leave our cultures into modern technology. We also should start using technology itself to spread our heritages in front of the world.

Aqil Anindityo Raharjo X-D/9