5 thoughts on “Blogiversary”

  1. Whatever did happen to cell phones? I haven’t heard of one in years.

    Happy Blogversery.

    A thought occurred to me at the laundromat: I was disposing of dead skin cells while being slightly annoyed by someone playing some sort of video in, I believe, Vietnamese.

    Now that immigrants can stream stuff from their original country, has a major motivation for learning English disappeared? The schools have decided that trying to teach immigrant children in English interferes with the learning process, not that native English speaking children seem to be learning much either. Hard to see this as a positive trend for our national identity.

  2. “Now that immigrants can stream stuff from their original country, has a major motivation for learning English disappeared?”…seems likely…although even in the days of high immigration & high assimilation, there were a lot of newspapers serving immigrants in their native languages.

    I think that technology–air travel, cheap international phone calls, Internet–has definitely made the decision to immigrate much less binary and irrevocable.

  3. Happy “Blogiversary”!

    Regarding immigrants, based on my family experience and those who worked for me/with, I would say it’s a matter of generations. Actual emigres do have that technology – communications, air travel – that allow them to stay in constant contact with the old country. Even 40 to 50 years ago that didn’t exist.

    Even given that I have found there is a degree of assimilation

    What really gets things going is the next generation as the kids Americanize, mostly through the solvent of pop culture. I have found that there is a tension between generations, very familiar to immigrant groups in our history, regarding the younger folks wanting to break from the older ways. Add another generation and you start to get intermarriage

    The biggest obstacle in the way of assimilation isn’t so much technology, but the school system which preaches “identity” and anti-Americanism.

  4. MCS
    Whatever did happen to cell phones? I haven’t heard of one in years.

    I have a flip phone, which I believe is what you define as a cell phone. Definitely not an i-phone or a smart phone, as texting is too cumbersome for me to attempt it. Cost me all of $20 brand new, which is a bit cheaper than an i-phone.

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