Videoconference with Iran = Awesome
Nov 6th, 2008 by sirtoppenhat
I rolled out of bed, got my midnight snack, and then shuffled to the library for an 8am call to Iran. The videoconference with the students from Tehran was obviously a unique and interesting opportunity. It was a little embarrassing that nobody remembered to consider the change in time over the weekend do to daylights savings and that this caused them wait around for us to arrive for an extra hour. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but the discussion turned out to be pretty interesting and since the students were studying the U.S. specifically, I was not really surprised that they had so many more questions than we did. I was also not surprised that the professor felt that we were sheltered from international news sources. This is certainly due to the overwhelming size of the 24-hour news cycle being generated in the U.S. for both domestic and foreign consumption. One certainly does have to make an extra effort to seek out international media, as we have done in this class, but with the help of the Internet, this is not such a discouraging task. I was also not surprised that the professor felt the need to lecture this point. From my international travel, and our class discussions on traveling abroad, it seems that many foreigners like to communicate to westerners in this way. I mean this, again, in the way that Americans are bombarded with news (from America) and foreigners are aware of what is happening in America, probably more than any other country besides their own. This is especially true when referring to the U.S.’ desire to avoid taking an interest in learning about other places besides the U.S. There is certainly some truth to this, but this is also perpetuated by the American media’s presence at home and abroad. This was apparent to me personally because upon hearing that the students’ focus was American studies, my initial reaction was to think, how weird it is that there would be a whole class of people, anywhere but America, wanting to spend their whole degree learning about America. Of course, this response has some close-minded problems. Their topics for study and discussion were also surprisingly similar to areas of interest to ours concerning media. Is this a result of the American media? Topics from bias to the media to the roles that comedy news shows play in influencing Americans seem to always come up in my communication classes. Or, maybe all diligent and scholarly students, around the world, are coming up with the same talking points. The idea that the students should not compare and contrast culture, while simpler to understand than how it was explained, and the students really seemed to do a good job of trying ask questions to learn about America in the context of just trying to learn about America. There is immense merit to taking this approach to learning, but most of us are unified by living on the same planet and different parts of the world have very different viewpoints, obviously. This unifying and dividing fact makes it impossible to avoid comparisons and it would be ignorant to not ever try and learn from them. Lastly, the students seemed to have been affected by the liberal media because they seemed more interested in the conservative thought process (voting for McCain) more so that the liberal one.