When I embarked on my AFS exchange experience in 2001, I didn’t have a cell-phone, my e-mail account was only 2 years old and neither Skype nor Facebook existed at that time. During my year long stay in Norway, I called my family back home once a month through a land line and kept the communications short to avoid unnecessarily high phone bills.
Nowadays, everything has changed and the above description of communication with my family might resemble a chapter from a history book for the generation that grew up during the recent boom of modern technology that allows us to communicate freely across the globe. The role of modern media and communication tools in the study abroad experience is a fascinating subject and it has been recently addressed in the article “How Facebook Can Ruin Study Abroad”.
Robert Huesca, professor of communication at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas USA, uses the comparison of his two long-term experiences abroad (in 1980 and 2012) to point out both the positives and negatives that new communication technologies bring to the study abroad experience.
Digital media and technology can be used for capturing stories of the people who live abroad and they provide space for sharing their experiences and learnings with family, friends and other audiences back home. They can also serve to build bridges between the sojourner and the local culture. The negative impact comes when the time spent connecting with “the familiar on-line” exceeds the time spent “living the real life” in the host country. Huesca also argues that excessive use of digital technology protects students from experiencing culture shock and the feelings of stress, loneliness and homesickness. Lack of these experiences can reduce the transformational impact of living abroad and ruin the opportunity for the personal development that motivates many of us to move to another country in the first place.
The above mentioned examples give just a little insight into how complex this issue is and how modern technology can play role both in inefficient and efficient coping strategies. This new reality is something we can’t really change or even just ignore. As the author of the article concludes, we can learn how to cope with the new situation and we should explore new approaches to the challenges that new technology represents. One of his concrete suggestions – adding technology management to curricula preparing students for their intercultural experience – is a very relevant and useful tip for all educational institutions and organizations providing study/live abroad experiences.