Virtual World addicts: The new butt dumb foreigners
By Till-Ted World
Once upon a time--in a world far better or worse than today--the adventurous among us would move to a place a long ways from home, say Berlin, Madrid or Tokyo; civilized places and therefore familiar, but with enough exotic shimmer to make your feet itchy and the mind curious.
The smells, the music, the faces you confronted were much different than your homeland and a more radical change than today when globalization is no longer creeping.
But the biggest shock was a sudden silence--oh not streets that just might pulse with raucous life--but the media wave that rolls over you from cradle to grave was gone. Say this was Berlin 15 years ago: flip through a day-old El Pais or Guardian, watch CNN or BBC until you could mouth the words to the looping news segments.
Then you shut off the TV and the silence returned.
That's when the person washed up from a distant shore reached for a German newspaper or magazine and turned back on the TV to watch the native shows and see if a few words stuck. Then you enrolled in language courses and those with aptitude became fluent and the rest learned enough to carry a conversation with their girlfriend's parent.
Or you just wanted to chat up that alluring native--that was a proven miracle worker to promote language skills.
Language is culture and media is culture and language is media--the new holy trinity--and the only one available abroad was real, physical and sometimes gritty and perplexing, floating at you from cars and theaters and chatting people in cafes in sounds you couldn't decipher. The only way to tune in was to learn the speech.
Those days are over--like all times that were better or worse than today. Now a new breed of wired foreigners is abroad, who bring their own culture in their laptop.
They don't speak the language because the holy trinity is locked up in their laptop. Media, language, culture. They never will, because language takes time and practice, and it requires the Bohemian Dance, that stage act popular in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The dancing woman ignores her would-be lover, closes in then pushes him away scornfully, ignores him, then finally falls into his arms in surrender.
All that is a real conflict for time with the demands of the virtual world, which almost always wins.
Oh, the virtual world is without a doubt exhilarating, a seismic shift. Who has time to adapt to the place you live in when you are flipping through your web sites and blogs, waiting for your favorite TV show to download with your headphones on, feet wiggling to one of the 1,000 songs on your hard drive. You have everything you had at home--the womb is transportable as long as they don't cut your umbilical cord, broadband.
You are everywhere these days to be seen in wifi cafes, your natural habitat. Outside that window is the new place, with strange customs and different faces, but it is a million miles farther away than Omaha, Brighton, Valencia, right there on your screen. What, a new culture? I mean, like, how does that compare to second life? Do you need an avatar?
Okay, that's cheap. Many of you hanging out in the virtual world are very smart people. This is a simple case of adaptation. That world that was a far better or worse place than today is history.
This virtual world foreigner is almost brand new. Even five years ago broadband wasn't readily available and cheap when abroad. Cafes in a city like Berlin offering free wifi have sprung up on every corner, but didn't exist then.
That's why the word isn't out on you yet.
One day soon, the first of you will return home and meet a person who finds you exciting--you lived three years in a place they find fascinating. Once they were an exchange student, and since have read books, studied the language at university, and yes followed the country's web sites.
They hope to get a year sabbatical to live in the country you came from, or that scholarship. And you, you are admirable because you had the chance and can impart that experience.
"Oh that was nothing," they will say to someone after lunch or a beer with you. "That woman was just a TVAT. She can tell you where a decent Chinese place is in the city, how much the underground costs, and where you can meet cool people that speak English. Oh, and she knows every wifi place in town."
That's why the world is always a far better or worse place than it once was. The virtual world may be fascinating, maybe even live up to the expectations, but it has also spawned the TVAT, the Total Virtual Always Tourist foreigner. Now matter how long they stay abroad, a TVAT never learns much about the place they are at.
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