How the telephone and the Internet separated people in exile

Hello.

Perhaps it was necessary to name this material somehow differently, but nothing came to mind. History is old

and has many dimensions, but the main thing is that itcan be well shown through the prism of emigration - labor, political or some other. The development of the Internet has created an environment that can be considered supranational, without any boundaries or restrictions. What is considered the norm today was unimaginable a few decades ago. I studied at an English special school, but the amount of additional materials left much to be desired, the periodical press was limited to the British Morning Star, the Canadian Canadian Tribune, as well as Moscow News and similar local publications. A huge layer of publications remained out of the access zone, and newspapers brought from Britain or the USA were read to holes. Words arose from them that were absent at that time in our everyday life and described the unfamiliar phenomena of everyday life - rent, interest income, shares, and the like. The same with audio cassettes, films in English - you can enumerate endlessly.

Today, anyone can learn a language withease, access is not only to educational materials, but also to any periodicals, films and videos in different languages. All this is a couple of clicks away from you, you can watch it from the phone screen anywhere - in transport on the road, at home or at work. The number of those who speak English has grown, those who speak well, too. But as soon as you get from Moscow or another large city to the periphery, there is a feeling that the old world order has not changed in any way, often young people do not speak other languages, do not see the point in this. It is possible that this is a matter of outlook on life, what you need from it, to some extent a matter of fashion. Looking at my children and those around them, I can say that the situation is radically different from the USSR. After graduating from school, they speak English fluently, and this is not some kind of exception, but the rule. A certain basis, unified and necessary for further study and life. Some have two languages ​​in their assets, their level of knowledge is not bad.

There are services on the network where you can find medialanguage, communicate with them, and it doesn't cost a dime. This is if you just learn languages, you do not have any interests and a corresponding social circle. In the second case, everything develops much easier and faster. In a literal sense, people all over the planet have become closer to us, we can reach them. Just as the media has gone global, I can easily read the New York Times or the Financial Times in the morning to get a US or British perspective on events. This was unthinkable before the advent of the Internet.

But a lot depends on our habits, capabilitiesand desires. The Internet creates ideal information bubbles, a comfortable environment of existence, from which you can not get out at all. Here is an example that will seem surprising, but such situations occur all over the world, there are no exceptions.

A new one appeared in our house a couple of years ago.cleaner, her name is Gulya. Gulya arrived from Tajikistan, she is twenty-odd years old, sometimes I meet her at the entrance, and we greet. The set of words that Gulya knows remains exactly the same as at the beginning of our acquaintance: hello, thank you, goodbye. It is possible that the vocabulary is larger, but this does not appear in any way. Progress in the study of the Russian language is not observed, and it is not needed, by and large. In the store you can collect a basket of products and pay for them with a card, communication with the cashier is not expected, and in some stores it is not necessary at all, you yourself punch your goods at the automatic checkout.

Telephones

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When Gulya cleans, she plays music, sometimes inwired headphones, sometimes she forgets them and then turns on the music quietly through the speaker of an inexpensive smartphone. Once I watched how she uses Google Translate, talking with an elderly woman in our entrance, they exchanged phrases through the phone. That is, it is impossible to say that Gulya is deprived of any opportunity to communicate, she has the means for this.

To be surprised that people like Gulya,find and quickly adapt new technologies to their needs, definitely not worth it. I think that she lives with the same migrants who work as janitors, couriers and have mastered other working professions. In such an environment, tools that make life easier spread very quickly.

Imagine that Gulya came to Moscow in 1990,when there was no Internet and mobile phones, and she needed to communicate with people. I am one hundred percent sure that in a matter of months her vocabulary and ability to speak Russian would have developed, she would have had no way out. The motivation for learning the language would be the need to communicate, as they say, life would make you learn Russian. Through language, a person voluntarily or involuntarily enters the context of the country, its culture, and integration begins. But this is not happening anywhere in the world today.

Internet and telephone create isolationa space where, no matter where you are, you preserve the cultural code of your society. You communicate in your native language, watch programs, listen to the radio, there is no hard need to immerse yourself in another culture. You rarely have the task of being successful in learning another language, pushing yourself into it. Of course, there are people who understand everything and are aware of the need to immerse themselves in the local world, they just create such conditions - they refuse this convenient and warm information bubble. And they achieve great success because they have motivation. But most people do not know how to motivate themselves, set goals and achieve them.

I'll give you another example.In Los Angeles, Uber employs a lot of people from Armenia, the diaspora in this city is huge. Young people usually speak English, there are no problems. But those who moved at the age of forty or older people experience difficulties with this. I noticed that usually they just create a comfortable world for themselves - they listen to native programs in the car, the music that they are used to, they read familiar newspapers online. They do not have strict conditions for survival when it is necessary to learn English, they are no different from the same Guli.

In New York yellow cab driver all the wayhe watches a broadcast from India, then chats with his relatives on Skype, it’s hard to listen to Hindi, and he only looks at the road from time to time, which is annoying. The driver's English is terrible, he barely pushes out some phrases. In the old days, a taxi, on the contrary, made it possible to quickly learn the language, for many it took only a year and a half. But times have changed.

The main problem of migration today is notthe cultural level of people, it can and should be changed. The stumbling block is that we have created technologies that allow you to be part of your community anywhere in the world. And this automatically means that integration into the local society becomes the tenth thing, it is not always obligatory. For the past decade, sociologists in Europe have been sounding the alarm that the new wave of migrants is getting worse and worse integrated into society. I read all sorts of explanations for this phenomenon, from the slanderous idea that the IQ level of these people has decreased and they need to be selected somehow differently, to the theory that the education system has failed. Here the blame, depending on the person's beliefs, is shifted either to the state, which does not integrate migrants, or to the latter, that they do not show superpowers. The reality, in my opinion, is different - we have created a world in which there are no conditions for the integration of people in a new place, language is not at all necessary for their survival, as well as integration into a local society.

Another example is from Los Angeles.There are a lot of Russian-speaking people in the city, they gather in a kind of clubs and have fun - parties, going to restaurants or a bathhouse, various games, barbecues on the ocean. Every week is different, it's easy to meet new people here. At one of these parties, a shy young man sat next to me, he looked to be about 25 years old. A programmer, in the past the winner of some Olympiads, he himself is from a small Russian city. He then worked in a medium-sized company, served their IT system, received little by local standards. The benefit for the employer here was obvious - a cheap labor force that will be tied to your company and is unlikely to change jobs. The inconvenience in the aspect of communication was corrected by a system in which they built a boss who knew Russian and gave out tasks, explaining exactly what was needed.

The guy was sitting to my right, and suddenly II heard: "Can you order me a beer too?". The first thought was that he wanted to go somewhere, but he did not move. Asked why he did not want to do it on his own, the answer was: "I do not speak English." A commonplace phrase that can be learned in a matter of days, but he did not know it. Another striking fact was that at that time he had lived in America for a year and a half. And he did not know the language at all, did not try to learn it and explained this by the fact that he did not have the ability for languages. Sweet self-deception, since I have not met people who would not learn languages ​​if life forced them to do so. The life of this guy passed in a cozy information bubble, where all the conditions were created so that he would not integrate into local life. And, by and large, it suited him, however, like his employer.

In recent years, I have accumulated manysimilar examples, each of them says exactly one thing. With all the richness and variety of information, we often do not have an incentive to seek it. Learning a language today is much easier than in the days of the USSR, there would only be a desire. It is also easy to integrate into another culture, there are no special obstacles. But we ourselves create them, as we become attached to our own culture, we transfer it to other countries.

This phenomenon has many dimensions, for example,in Germany, the Russian-speaking diaspora is integrated into the local society to one degree or another. But at the same time, there is practically no separation from the roots, from one's own culture. Anyone who was in Berlin on the ninth of May is fully aware of this, through the Tiergarten people carry carnations to the monument to Soviet soldiers, military songs are heard from the speakers. And it's not only the elderly, they go with their families, including the smallest ones. Tanks standing on pedestals are covered with flowers. And here, too, the penetration of cultural space into other countries through the network is observed, it becomes difficult or impossible to break away from it. The phenomenon does not have purely negative consequences, as it might seem from the first part of my story, as always, there are two sides to it.

Internet, mobile phones created for usa new version of the habitat, where information is available at any time and anywhere in the world. Attempts to put obstacles in the way of information have always been unsuccessful, the same experience of China proves this in full, it is not possible to filter information. And I think that this state of affairs will continue, at least if we are talking about the next decade. But the main quality that you need to cultivate in yourself and others in this abundance of information is the desire to change something, to see the goal and be able to go towards it. Motivation is needed, without it all these tools become useless. As practice shows, many people have problems with motivation. And even in such difficult situations as migration, when, it would seem, your whole life and future are at stake.

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