This post is going to hit close to home… literally!
Way back a few years ago sometime in 2005, I think, I bought a webcam. This wasn’t the first webcam I had bought, but it was the first good webcam I had the pleasure of using. The iSight! I was so anxious to try it out, that I signed on to the first social cam site I could find. It was Chatfinder, and I met some pretty cool people on there.
Most of them were American, like the wonderful Mixkat, aka Sonya (she’s a Facebook friend as well, too!). But, I also struck up my first international friendship on that camera, as well. This would be Christian Wüst, from Germany. To this day, he has continued to be a good friend to Christine and I, and he was our friend and guide on our vacation last year in his home country. One of the most heartwarming things I took from that experience was talking with his friends and seeing that we are all not so dissimilar as we’d like to think sometimes. Also, in conversation, they took us as an exception to the general view of Americans, which is that we are mostly ignorant.
Before that vacation and since then, I have me and talked to various people on the Internet in other countries. Mainly small talk, but some good conversations nonetheless. However, I have just had a Skype conversation tonight with a gentleman from Brazil. In the talks that we had, one of the things that came up was the very same thing I got from one of our German friends last year. Both conversations echoed the viewpoints from people that have only (or mostly) seen Americans from the perspective of entertainment and news filtering. To most of them, we are funny, intriguing but somewhat… well… not quite intelligent, with some exceptions of course.
This strikes me, not as insulting, but quite humbling. It tells me that we in America should be doing a better job in reaching out to people in other parts of the world. We should not be afraid to learn about other countries and cultures by making new friends internationally, and seeing through their eyes and listening to them. America has a huge tendency towards having an isolationist stance. And it’s hurting us more so than helping us.
The Internet, with all these wonderful tools that are becoming more inexpensive every day (computer, headset, a camera which is sometimes integrated with the monitor) and free cam software, has definitely made the world as small as one’s living room. Let’s get off our Big Mac-ized butts and talk to our international friends!
Prost! Saúde! … Cheers!
