Culture Shock and Spongebob Squarepants

One of my favorite Spongebob episodes is when he accidentally takes the bus to Rock Bottom on his way home from glove world. It also was one of the scariest (a long with the Hash Slinging Slasher episode). As hilarious and frightening as the episode is, it's very relatable to culture and sociology especially to the terms culture shock, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativity.

Basically, what happens is Spongebob finds him self lost in Rock Bottom, where life is completely different from what he knows. Everything is dark, people look and speak strangely, and Spongebob can't even read the bathroom signs. When he first arrives, he experiences culture shock, meaning he is overwhelmed and confused about the culture of Rock Bottom. He gets scared and paranoid because everything is so different to him. He also feels a sense of ethnocentrism because he feels the the life down in Rock Bottom is wrong. The buses run at an unusually evasive time, and people spit while they talk to him, and because Songebob's culture doesn't follow these customs, he believes everyone else is wrong, which makes him afraid. At the end of the episode, however, a Rock Bottom citizen that Spongebob feared the whole time, ended up helping him float back home in his Glove World balloon. In this scene, Spongebob becomes more culturally relative, understanding that while the culture in Rock Bottom might be different than his, it isn't wrong or right, it's just different.