True culture is imperceptible except in the most rare conditions such as the cultural ebb and flow observable, for example, in oil towns where boom and bust economic cycles cause rapid, visible, and more stressful culture change on populations.
Real culture change takes years, usually generations, and the thoughts and behaviors it brings happen in small increments, small adjustments of attitudes and actions over a period of time in our everyday lives which more and more people adopt with decreasing resistance. Real culture change becomes so well accepted that we perform the behaviors without thinking, subconsciously, and we pass these actions and attitudes onto our children as an accepted way of life. For example, we get up in the morning and put on clothes. The action of putting on clothes is made consciously, particularly which clothes we should wear according to our station in society, but we do not question the requirement to wear clothes in the first place. In current mainstream American society, we do not question each morning whether or not to wear clothes or to go naked that day. Real culture change is adopted by the mainstream society. The wide acceptance of computers into our working and personal lives is another example of culture change, as was the automobile before that.
Freelance Literati 