digital supernova

Going abroad this time around is an entirely different experience than my first venture - in many many ways, but particularly because the world is so much more wired now ... or at least I am more hip to it.

In Spain, six years ago, I spent cold hours at telephone booths, fumbling through a flip book of numbers and punching in phone-card codes about as long as pi. I occasionally sent mass e-mail updates, but my regular contacts back home dwindled to the handful of folks who were willing to correspond in lengthy e-mails or phone conversations. I found my housing and language buddies off bulletin boards, and hoped to make friends off of chance and dicey Spanish skills in buses or classes or bars ... which didn't work very well. I spent many an hour and peseta - then Euro - in Internet cafes and on phone cards. And it seemed like I spent even more time in transit to get to those cafes and phone cards.

Before going to Spain, I scoured my music collection for the precious couple dozen CDs that would remind me of home, I lived in silence for the few weeks before splurging on a small boombox, and I listened to those songs - even the dubious ones - so many times that I can't hear them now without being whisked back to Madrid. Any television I watched was Spanish, and although I found some information about events and such online, I seemed to spend most of my life there tracking down details. (Though that could be more of a cultural thing ...)

In Korea, I now have an Internet connection in my bedroom AND office AND classroom ... and go a little crazy when it goes out. I have two computers and ridiculously cheap phone service right from one - though I don't tend to use it much (sorry!) because I'm generally chatting online with folks back home at both ends of the day and occasionally in between. Subsequently, I've (thusfar) kept a far wider net of regular contacts than last time around.

And let's not forget this blog, which lets me post any old thing without cluttering your mailboxes, and services like Blogarithm, which let you clutter your mailboxes all you like. Plus there are blog readers that help me keep up on the latest from my blogging friends and other news and newsy sites ... not to mention that now there's just a ridiculous amount of information out there. I'm not sure how people lived before they could look any old thing up on Google. I mean, really, how did we survive without being able to instantly figure out:

• the Billboard Top Ten,
• how long pi really is,
• how the Korean pension system works,
• the lyrics to Dar Williams' "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono,"
• a map of the Korean rail system,
• the name of that artist who makes the hyper-real human sculptures,
• how to create a "tornado" in a bottle,
• whether there really are flesh-eating amoebas,
• the Korean word(s) for "older brother,"
• where Arkansas City is in Kansas,
• rapper Mos Def's biography,
• who's behind that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• the spelling of the new French president's name

... to name a few of dozens of searches I've done in the past couple days. Such info was around six years ago, but it was nowhere near as cataloged or accessible. Plus I had to make lists of things to look up at my next Internet cafe outing, rather than just walking into the next room to check ... so I think most of my wonderings tended to go unresearched.

Forums for expats here offer a scattershot of advice (or misadvice), how-to's (or how-not-to's), insight (or lack thereof), happenings and other information for the hapless foreigner (that is, me). More and more academic studies are going up online all the time, and news sources are getting better systems to deliver targeted news to those who go searching for it, so it's now easier to back or kill some theory I've formed about the culture.

I pick up bits of Korean for free through a particularly great podcast on Apple's iTunes, and I brought over something close to my entire music collection without adding an ounce to my luggage. Not only do I have all my tunes at home, I can take them out and about for runs, long bus rides or any other time I'd rather keep the world at a distance. Occasional NPR podcasts keep me somewhat up to date on U.S. politics and culture of the day, and YouTube and other video-sharing programs keep me abreast of the latest pop culture phenomenons. Some of my TV-phile co-workers have hookups to get American television delivered to their computers (or scour the Net for illegal streams), and good old iTunes dishes up a smorgasboard of shows to buy by episode or season - I've caught an episode of one of my old standbys and one of the promising newbies. There's also the photo-sharing programs that I haven't made much use of yet, but eventually I'll get there.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to this digital age: making connections in the real world. The majority of my non-work friends here are from that whole social networking phenomenon - MySpace and Facebook and others - or connections of people I met that way. I know this idea probably freaks some of you out a little, but the Net can be a fabulous tool for someone as persnickety about friends as I am because it gives you a chance to survey all sorts of folks at a deeper level than seeing someone sitting across the way and guessing (1) that they speak English, (2) are even remotely compatible with me and (3) are open to making a new friend. I've definitely been off the mark a time or two, but mostly it's worked out really well.
(And don't worry, I have no intentions of ending up in someone's freezer, so I take all the usual precautions of limiting personal info, meeting in public places with friends, etc.)

Each generation has its defining things: wars, protests, big hair ... I'd say my generation's defining characteristic is that we were those who grew up with the Internet. We're old enough to remember a time without it (foggily) and are now its main consumers - young enough to have adapted fairly wholesale, old enough to have freedom and buying power to use it relatively unhampered. (These are of course generalizations.) Tomorrow my little cousins will be calling us old fogies as they pass us up on those virtual highways, but we will have been the forefront, and it's an interesting position, no doubt. I wonder what it says about us.