28 Jan Only Connect
In spring of 2000, I moved to the northern France city of Lille to spend a semester abroad. At that point, Internet usage hadn’t really penetrated French homes—only 10% of the French population used the Internet (in the U.S. at the same time, between 45 and 50% of American adults were online). My host family didn’t own a computer, nor did any of the other families that hosted the American students in my group. I had a laptop in the U.S. but didn’t bother bringing it with me.
If I wanted to use the Internet, I went to the cybercafé in the center of town. I rarely spent more than half an hour there. It was full of smoke, and the slightly sour smell of the adolescent males who filled the place in the afternoon to play video games online. The French keyboards were also a hindrance to electronic communication. The positions of the A and Q were reversed, as were the W and Z. I had to hold down the shift key in order to type a period. It took me 15 minutes of laborious pecking to produce a two-paragraph email that was riddled with spelling errors and inevitably signed, “Love, E,ily”, a function of the M and comma key being reversed.
As a result, I mostly relied on letters to stay in touch with family and friends. The phone came with its own set of pitfalls, as I found out when I used my credit card to call my boyfriend a couple of times. With connection fees and the exorbitant international rates they charged, our conversations ended up costing about $10/minute.
In 2007, I moved to France again, this time as a master’s student. In just seven years, the technological shift was remarkable. WiFi was seemingly everywhere, and I had a staggering number of options to stay in touch with friends and family. I used Google chat if I wasn’t in a place where I could talk easily. Facebook allowed me to be up-to-date on the most mundane details of their lives. Phone calls from my landline to the U.S. were free, but if they hadn’t been, I could have just used Skype to talk to people. The landline, in fact, gave me free calls to more than 40 countries, and I had no reason not to take advantage of it. My entire digital package—Internet, TV and phone, cost around 35 euros per month.
The world felt much smaller than it had the first time I was in France. And like many aspects of our hyper-connected age, this was both good and bad. This connectivity eased my transition out of my old life in the U.S. But it also made it harder to immerse myself in my new one. I had to make real efforts to read French newspapers or magazines, or watch French television. I’d come here for a cultural immersion but the temptation to cling to the familiar was hard to resist. It remains hard, more than five years later. The Daily Show and the New York Times are just a click away. Do I really want to watch the evening news on France 2 with David Pujadas, struggle to stay informed about the floundering steel industry, or the proposed changes to the length of the French school week?
Nowadays, being immersed in a new culture—especially one that exists in a modern, technically advanced country—takes a lot of effort and willpower (which I don’t have enough of). I have certainly become more engaged in current events here. I follow the headlines—French military actions in Mali, rising unemployment, the implementation of a new car-sharing program. But I do have a small obsession with American politics, and this means that I spend a lot more time than I probably should on American news sites, or reading American blogs. French politics do interest me–during the run-up election last May, I spent many happy hours discussing with French friends what the possible outcomes would mean. I rushed home after work to watch the Sarkozy-Hollande debate, and followed all the post-debate analyses. But I feel less involved in it — probably because I don’t have the right to vote, which makes me a perpetual outsider.
The best I can do is compromise. I try to watch the news at least a few times a week, and buy a newspaper on the weekend (better than reading articles online, because I can underline the words I don’t know to look up later). I have a “French-reading” policy on the metro that I more or less adhere to, and have thus discovered a number of French writers that I enjoy. But it remains a struggle, remaining so connected to people and events back home, while trying to integrate here. Being tethered to one makes it harder to reach the other. And yet I am loath to let go.