The first time I studied abroad, I made it three and a half miles with four sandwiches and a change of clothes, which is to say that I was thirteen running away from home. I bring this event up because I think that we all tend to forget how valuable those first unaccompanied steps outside of our homes were, how much they put this fragile little world into perspective. I was like Siddhartha come out of his palace to see the world with all its blemishes and spots. The event left me with a profound wisdom that I would like to pass on: one does not have to travel well or very far in order to experience substantial change. Perhaps, this is true now more than every before. Digital media is shortening the distance between image and experience even more than my thirteen year old self could have imagined, and the result is not necessarily a good thing.
Before a student even gets to their host country, they are so bombarded by digital imagery and text that is hard to tell how much this tampers the process of true cultural inundation. From Facebook to Café Abroad students ask about where to get X at the abroad site, whether or not you can wear Y, how others evaluate classes at the local university, the sort of host family experiences to expect and so on. Their experiences become highly regulated, not only as academic oversight and safety precautions increase, but also as cultural encounters become over-documented and readily available out of context in both virtual and other sites not attached to the locality where students will study
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Even that catalogues produced by institutions of higher education to promote genuine abroad experiences aid in this cheapening of experience. Catalogues respond to the needs of stakeholders – universities, parents, students – by promoting messages that: 1) comply with good business policy, articulating what goods (experiences) will be delivered for what price; and 2) communicate necessary tenets, for example as the Harvard Catalogue says, that "the best way to develop...global competence is to have firsthand experience living abroad" that studying abroad will help you "develop a deeper understanding of their own society" and that ultimately "planning to spend time abroad is one of the most exciting things you will do." These catalogues also reveal what one can expect to see, which means that anomalies, ephemeral experiences and exceptions to the cultural rule, some of the most important parts of any journey abroad, must invariably be kept out.
If, however, all of this changed when a student finally got abroad, my concerns would not be so great. However, what is intriguing to me is that this digital bubble that technology and image has made around us seems to shatter little, or at the very least not enough, upon actually cultural engagement. Karen Rodríguez, PhD and director of the CIEE Study Center in Guanajuato, Mexico says that "too many students come abroad only to spend their time tightly wired into Skype, the Internet and Facebook, seemingly more concerned about capturing images for those at home than actually experiencing the wonders at their fingertips." Students spend an average of 1440 minutes on a cell phone daily while abroad, an estimated 1250 minutes daily looking at the world through the lens of a digital camera, and almost 2800 minutes listening to an ipod. This digital desensitization is causing Rodríguez how much time students actually spend abroad.
All of this digital inoculation has me questing what exactly it means to study abroad in the digital age. If it means getting outside of your comport bubble, then should not we all leave our cell phones and laptops at home? If it means getting a new perspective, then should not we attempt to get a perspective on our own lives before we burden another society with our bias? And if it means, as it traditionally has, that studying abroad is meant to help you experience a new culture, then I have to ask how much of this is even possible in an era so dominated by globalization and global identities, where English is spoken as the number one language on the WORLD wide web and 47 million McDonalds customers every day?
If studying abroad is going to continue, it has to reinvent itself within its digital confines. Experts in the field are pointing to what they call digital story telling, short, first person narratives, often video narratives created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds. Karen Rodríguez notes that "while digital storytelling does not embody or ensure critical intercultural thinking, I argue that it has a tremendous potential for re-creating both students and host community members as authors and representers of their experiences, thus creating a 'counter-catalogic' study abroad experience that goes far beyond the staid images used to market these experiences." The idea is not new or novel; many students keep blogs while studing abroad. But tweeking this method to incorporate a further developement of experience could potentially be a leap forward, a judo on the digital invasion. Check out the blog for the USC Study Abroad Program in Barcellona to get a look at what this might mean here.
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