Neapolitan

I really can not agree with that at all. The US is very open, it has more language spoken and more religions practice then most countries in the world. More parades for more nationalities then anywhere I know of. It's like an open city not a enclosed fortress, people come cross it's borders at will, on a daily basis. I've met a lot of people nationalities and it's amazing how many keep their old prejudices from their old country. So in that way I don't see the US as closed culturally as much as it's a global phenomenon.

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Guybrush

So would you argue that if you take the average pakistani and italian, they are more culturally different when they live in America than when they live in respective countries?

You guys are forgetting to think comparatively. The anglosphere covers a huge geographical area. If you take all that area and impose it on the parts of the world that do not have english as the first language, do you think it would round off an area with more cultural diversity or less? Generally speaking without worrying too much about where you put down the borders, I would think more. You're talking about america and then I think you forget how huge the US is. Many of the countries your immigrants come from could fit inside the same geographical area the US covers.

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Something Completely Different

Neapolitan

I am not quite clear what you mean by "more cultarally different." I'm not trying to be coy or anything like that. I wouldn't mind to answer that when I know better what you mean, I've seen something else you wrote I choosed to repsond to.

I chosen three aspects where culture could be comparatively discussed.

Culture is ever evolving
In a way you can use an anology of doing:saying::culture:language. Just as someone who studies language he slowly begins to understands that language is always in an evolutionary process - well, culture is like that too. It's always evolving, if you take the Western Culture (America and Europe) and compare any two decades twenty years apart, in some respects it is an entirely different world from each other. The developement of English is very interesting (just as every language) The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Vikings, the Normans, the loan words from French, scientific names from Latin and Greek all played a part in developing English which has something like a half millions words in it, and that's not a hyperbole. The English language kept the basic things from it's Germanic origin and adopted or adapted words (foreign its origin) throughout its history, some words come in vogue and other words are dropped. Culture is like that you can take group or country and you can see some traditions that go back for generations, and some things that are picked up, or dropped fairly recently.

Culture is interrelated
You can also think of culture almost like Biological classification the taxonomic rank of order falls between kingdom and species, well cultural experience is somewhere between a human experience and a personal experience. A person is a part of a town, a county, a state, country etc and a person is also a part of a family, clan, tribe, race, whatever all the way up to the human race. You can find differences and likenesses between people, family, up to a larger group where collectively it is noticeably a culture.

Culture is stratatified
Sometimes "culture" doesn't have a connotaion of a high-brow culture belongs only to the erudite and oligarchy, and where the lower class are considered uncultured. The demographics of America could be divided by wealth, education, location, race, ethnic background, Big3's post above basicly says everything I was going to say here.

Back to your original question, it's a difficult question because when you start thinking comparatively you can see how nebulas culture can be. I even forgot my train of thought, ee gads I wanted to tie it together somehow, I definitely had a point somewhere but I lost it.

I guess you are worried that Norway is dropping Norwegian culture and picking up this "coperate" culture of America, film, music, books, tv programs etc -mass media. And this transference of culture is happening differently then it did in the past where people actually meet before they had a cultural exchange and it took time to happen. But its mass media, how much of it is fact or fiction? How much of it is a personal, a human, experience being portrayed vs. something strictly American?

Weren't there common threads between ethnic groups culturally long before the modern age of mass media? And who is control of mass media, and do they have their own agenda?

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