How+are+these+students+different?

===Throughout the decades, immigrants coming to North America have been subject to assimilation and cultural homogenization. North America's earlier immigrants struggled to maintain ties to their homeland and sacrificed many aspects of their culture in order to adapt and survive in their new home. In the later twentieth century however, technological innovation that facilitated travel and communication (for example, jet travel and the long distance telephone), made it possible for immigrants to live in a new place but still hold strong connections to their homeland.===

===Nina Glick Schiller in her article, "[|From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration]", calls immigrants who are firmly rooted in their new country but who maintain multiple linkages to their homeland //transnational immigrants//, or //transmigrants.// (1). The introduction of digital technology facilitated transnational lifestyles even further. As stated by Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen in //Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth Century Canada,// "late-century technological innovations...invigorated transnational cultures as an unprecedented history force at the end of the century" (239).===

===So what does this all mean in relation to our students? It means that students immigrating from all over the world to Canada are living within a transnational culture. They are continuing to interact with their homeland and sustaining their identity and culture that in another time period would have been enveloped through cultural homogenization. It appears that communicative technology, in particular the internet, is the ultimate tool in allowing these students to live as transnational immigrants. In the article, "[|Nationalism and the Internet]", Thomas Hylland Eriksen reaches a similar conclusion. According to Eriksen, the internet creates an umbrella which protects the scattered diasporas around the world. Cultural diversity persists more than it would have in an earlier era, when encapsulation and assimilation would most likely have been the long-term outcome (15). Contrary to social scientific predictions, the Internet does not result in reduced diversity and cultural homogenization. Rather, the Internet is a tool which strengthens cultural diversity. This idea is eloquently summarized by Eriksen:=== ==="Research on the Internet shows how this technology often strengthens rather than weakens national identites, and that can be excpetionally efficient in reproducing such identities across vast distances, uniting dispersed populations in virtual communities" (15).===





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