The New "Dish City": Year Abroad and technology

This is the first in a series of ten Year Abroad posts I will be writing this summer. They will deal with a range of topics, from culture, to history, to the positively urbane. This first one is mostly about the nominal experience of the year abroad, and how technology has changed it.

One of the things I lost on my year abroad – besides four folding bikes, two pairs of trousers, and, annoyingly, the ability to speak fluent English, was my old laptop: a beastly thing with almost 5 years of solid service. While I never made a habit of taking my laptop into university to study, preferring to stick to a paper and pen and the occasional library computer, I found the machine an essential component of my year away nonetheless; seeing as it enabled me to watch Peep Show at my leisure as long as I had it around. While most British television channels use region-locked online players, YouTube, Netflix and the like circumvent this. Yet this wonderful boon is in fact a double-edged sword, for reasons that perhaps aren’t immediately obvious.

The elusive reason why easy access to a lake of cultural icons is bad for the year abroad is that it comes in a sea of other factors that equally impede immersion and encourage distraction. The proliferation of the Skype call. The emergent habitual use of social networks. A culture baked into computers and detached from location. So what's the problem with all this?

When I came up with the idea this article, I was disappointed to find that someone had already written something very similar nary 3 years earlier, over at Guardian Students. However, it didn’t stop me from writing this up, because I felt that those 3 years were almost enough on their own account in terms of the technological change that’s taken place in the meantime. The uptake of streaming services has skyrocketed since; far more people wear headphones in the streets; the idea of the “digital detox” has become commonplace, and people worry a lot more about their usage. The tipping point might well be Apple’s decision to actively encourage people to put down their phone with the monitoring functions on their newest models. But how does this fundamental sea change affect the year abroad?

We should begin with a straightforward admission: spending a year in a foreign country is much easier now than it would have been not just 30 years ago, but 20, 10, even 5 years prior. The simplicity of life abroad is not only a consequence of the ease of translation (google translate lets you download dictionaries of words for offline use) but a whole swathe of other methods that help ease anxiety.

On European exchanges, data packages now transfer anywhere across the EU, so now we can Skype and message friends and relatives from home as regularly as we’d like; one of my flatmates last term, a girl from Belgium, made a point of Skyping someone literally every night. I didn’t complain; stiff upper lip and all that. But it proves a point: these connections to home ease anxieties in myriad ways. The problem is when they start to actively encourage introversion.

For what is the reason to attend a night out arranged by your local international student body if you can spend the evening staying in touch with home? Why read foreign literature or watch foreign television when you have immediate access to both on your computer – or even your phone? This phenomenon, where immigrants or visitors have immediate access to their native culture, has coined a term: the “dish city”, expressing a collective, not necessarily geographically contiguous or segregated in nature, that shares a common heritage abroad and therefore connects with it rather than the society in which they live – provided the means exist. This term was originally coined, rather problematically, to apply to segregated immigrant communities in Western cities. Perhaps the Year Abroad application is more apt. For a year is hardly enough time to integrate, “a good time, not a long time”, as they say. But is it a good time if you ignore the cultural offering of the country you choose?

Of course, it would be absurd to extrapolate – with no data whatsoever – that lots of people are foregoing experiencing a foreign country to watch Bake Off. But maybe it’s not so untoward to think that students will turn to the culture they know, more often than when they had less opportunity to do so. This doesn’t just reduce their ability to forge long term friendships; it also means they use their target language less and gain less knowledge of the country they travel to. The fact that most universities place little value on the grade attained during the year abroad also discourages serious attempts to integrate and get involved in foreign university life, because it doesn’t matter so much. Before I generalise too much, the takeaway is that, however minuscule this change might be, it risks neutralising multiple key advantages of taking a year abroad in the first place.

Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that we still see the year abroad as a panacea on a graduate’s CV, as if they’ve trekked across the Sahara and handed their diploma to an ancient sheikh. The truth of it is that almost all year abroad excursions now include enough technological checks and balances to make things far easier for the students taking them, especially in the UK, given the abundance and proliferation of internet culture in English. Meanwhile, internet translators and sources make studying abroad even easier, while students on work experience benefit from an ever bigger percentage of natives who already speak English. This isn’t to say that students finishing their year abroad as I speak shouldn’t still feel proud; these changes are more of a warning to future travellers than anything else. In today’s wired-up world, a student who wants to truly immerse themselves on the year abroad will need to be more proactive than ever before, so long as the dish city rules supreme.