#NoFilter: Why Social Media Doesn’t Mean the End of Immersion

A debate is raging – online of course – about social media, technology, smartphones, and how these tools are either destroying the study abroad experience, or enhancing it. There’s no doubt that recent advancements in technology and the rise of the Digital Age have affected international education. But do these technologies prevent students from fully engaging with their host culture/s while abroad? Is social media a force that impedes immersion or can it be a tool to connect students to their new communities? These are especially pertinent questions in a year where over one billion people logged onto Facebook in a single day - that’s one out of every seven people on the planet.

In many ways, fears about social media damaging the study abroad experience are absolutely justified. With Wi-Fi now nearly ubiquitous across the globe, family and friends back home are only a few clicks away no matter where you are. Easy contact with home can relieve a lot of the stress of moving to another country, but this may not be the positive development that it appears to be. In the words of one international educator, “The corrosive consequences of new communication technologies are evident when the hours spent chatting online, listening to a homegrown playlist, or watching television reruns take time away from conversing with a local friend, hearing a native song, or learning an indigenous dance or game.” Studies have found that losing the intensity of culture shock can actually impede cultural immersion.

With a smartphone in nearly every student’s pocket these days, apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow travelers to instantaneously communicate regardless of national borders. In the words of a blogger for the Wall Street Journal, smartphones allow travelers to be “nowhere and everywhere at the same time.” In short: it doesn’t matter where you are because you are still connected to the entire world. You don’t need to ask a local for directions because you have Apple Maps. Looking for a restaurant recommendation in Dublin? Yelp now has a global reach. And maybe that’s the biggest danger: smartphones allow us to depend less and less on the people around us. Not only can this kind of disconnection impede language acquisition, it allows precise planning to replace exploration, it means that we never have to be lost. While this can be comforting at times, it may also hurt the development of important life skills like independence, confidence, and leadership.

Advancements in technology and means of communication aren’t just affecting U.S. college students, though. The vast majority of Facebook users now live outside of North America. This shift means that social media is becoming a normalized way for students to explore the culture of their host countries. In my own experience, social media was a fantastic way to connect and keep in contact with new friends that I would have struggled to see again otherwise.

At a time when more and more universities are developing policies requiring students to take social media pledges, we need to take into account how pervasive social media is to our students’ everyday lives. It’s become a part of American culture. And part of study abroad is having a cultural exchange, both absorbing your host country’s culture and also sharing your own. Leaving social media behind when you study abroad could be both a rejection of your own culture and of a nearly universal means of connecting with locals.

The internet breaks down our traditional definitions of “host” versus “home” culture, precisely because it connects people across the planet. (For example, check out this video of a band from the Balkans covering “Toxic” by Britney Spears on the streets of Munich, Germany.) While this creates challenges for us as educators, we need to be able to respond to the means and methods by which local cultures are becoming more and more globalized. The friction and creative power of cultural meeting points is precisely what makes study abroad so impactful, and these days social media has a role to play in these interactions.

The issue is not social media or the internet itself. It’s how we use them within a broader cultural context. Certainly many students spend their time online connecting with home, or finding ways to procrastinate before an exam. But there can be culturally meaningful ways to use these tools as well.  A recent study by the Journal of Information Technology Education found that new PhD students moving into a remarkably different environment used Facebook as an important tool for “knowledge exchange,” “alleviating [social] apprehension,” and “building community.” And revolutions like the Arab Spring, as well as recent uprisings in China and Thailand, have proven that social media is a key method of organizing and passing on information where other mass-media fails. Even binge researching the memes and YouTube sensations of another country may not be a void experience.

I was about to say something along the lines of “this isn’t the social media of your parent’s generation.” But here’s the thing: that doesn’t exist. We’re living through an interpersonal revolution, on the edge of a society radically different from anything else in the history of human interaction. We’re dealing with technologies that have developed faster than our ability to normalize them. And despite all claims that Facebook is no longer cool, social media and the internet aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. As international educators, our job is not to reject these platforms, but rather to determine a way that they can be integrated into a student’s time abroad in a healthy and meaningful way.

Last Updated November 2016