On my flight back from US this weekend, I came across an interesting article in IHT: “I live in Russia, my phone lives in New York”. It’s a gently humorous piece where the author, Clifford Levy, describes how his life in Russia has changed due to his Vonage phone. He writes…
Dial my New York number, the same one that I’ve had for a decade, and you’ll be connected to me in St. Petersburg with such speed that you’ll suspect that this whole expatriate-in-Russia thing is a sham.
—
With some familiar touch-tones, the impromptu phone yakking with family and friends - that comforting staple of modern life - has endured. My friend Rachel needed recipe advice one morning while roaming a Fairway supermarket in Brooklyn, so she pressed the autodialer on her cellphone. Presto, I was pontificating about the virtues of roasted eggplant with fresh garlic.It is, in other words, a balm for homesickness. When my daughter was feeling lonely at a school where the teachers and students jabbered at her only in Russian, she was able to have a lengthy pep talk with a pal from her old school in New York. Sometimes it seems that I speak with my parents in New York more now than I did when I was in the United States. (That’s not a complaint, Mom, I swear!)
At a time when one can read Beruit Times as easily as Jerusalem Post or listen to Beatles as easily as Zulu music, most of us choose to stay ensconced in our culture even when we travel. When my father visited us in US, he made it a point to keep reading the Indian newspapers on the web. He followed the same cricket matches and listened to the same music.
The trouble with all this is that when we live in echo chambers on the web and interact largely with our online friends, there is really no incentive to understand and appreciate other cultures. Clifford Levy makes the same point, albeit, more eloquently…
Still, I wonder whether the phone with the 718 area code has brought America too close. Living abroad has long been a formative time for Americans both ordinary and celebrated - think Franklin and Jefferson in the nation’s early years or Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1920s. A sense of dislocation shaped their experiences and, arguably, gave them better insight into the United States and the world. The writing of expatriates today perhaps has a different cast because nothing seems far away anymore.
In the past, cut off from your old life, you might have tried harder to immerse yourself in your new one. That was part of the allure of being an expatriate: learning a new language, overcoming isolation by trying to cultivate friends among the locals, making daily discoveries about another part of the world. Could Fitzgerald have come up with “Tender Is the Night” - a tale of romance and upheaval and disillusionment among expatriates in Europe - had he been able to spend hours a week on the phone with the folks back home?
The reality is that internet, satellite television and handheld devices like cell phones and iPods are creating micro-cultures. I think the danger from this emergence of micro-cultures is significant. Radicalism can get a boost. Only in the last few months we have seen how radical worldviews can easily thrive among small groups of people living in open societies like Britain.
Despite the obvious risks I am cautiously optimistic. I regard rooted-ness as important. Alvin Toffler said that your ability to change is a function of your unchanging core. I find this to be a profound statement. If we have to make people comfortable with the change that surrounds them, we have to let them become rooted to an unchanging core. For some people, this can be a place that they love staying in. It can be a house. It can be an ideology. Or it can be a micro-culture that they are immersed in. The optimistic part of me would like to believe that micro-cultures may actually allow people to deal with change better in areas outside of music, religion and politics. The domain that might benefit most is possibly the workplace.
Do you share my cautious optimism? Where will this emergence of micro-cultures take us? I look forward to hearing from you.
Well it boils down to how risk averse and what mind set people have. Do you want to take the road less travelled on? As one gets transplanted in the midst of another culture - either you have ghetoism - a china town or a little india etc. Tends to have backlashes - Indians in Figi / SA / Kenya, Algerians in France and so on..
The famous ABCD syndrome in the US is another example of the pressures that kids face in their daily life - parents pull them in one direction and peer pressure to be accepted in school/society in the other.
There is a huge debate on the nikhab in the UK/France and other parts of the EU - personal freedom of choice vs society acceptance.
Where to draw the line? My personal opinion is that people have to make a choice and accept the pros with the cons - most people want the pros of multiple options and want to negate the cons by creating micro-cultures - how far will the local society allow one to take it is the issue..
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