After getting a webcam, not only have we been talking to friends and family halfway around the world several times a week, (which is great!) but with internet phone service, it cost hardly anything at all to make those calls. When I became an expat in 1971, needless to say, it was before the internet and the age of modern technology and it cost an arm and a leg to make an international call. Talking to my mom and dad was a luxury I could only make two or three times a year.
We didn’t have e-mail or instant messages where you could communicate daily, and there were no blogs letting your family know your every move, or your every thought, in a foreign land. There weren’t digital cameras where you could take a photo and then instantly put it on your computer. Back then I would write letters to my family and if I sent photos I would have to wait a week for them to be developed, and sometimes it would take weeks or even months before I would get the “latest news” from home.
In todays world you don’t even have to miss your favorite programs; you just watch them on the internet or podcast them on your mp3. Yes it’s easy for expats to stay connected with their families and friends, but it’s also easy for them to stay connected to their culture and their roots and in some ways, it’s almost as if they never left home!
Modern technology is wonderful, but it has also taken away from expats that cultural immersion and richness that I, and others like me, experienced being so far from home. It was a cultural shock and an isolation in a foreign land that we slowly and wholeheartedly embraced. I, for one, think that we experienced our new adopted land to a much greater degree than expats do today, and in some ways that is unfortunate for new expats around the world.
Maya Muses: We’re all expats on this Earth, profoundly lost in an illusion that what we are living is real; when in reality one day we’ll wake up to find that all this was just a dream. Or for some, a nightmare.
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