A view from the Veneto...

This semester I’m in Northern Italy, teaching "Global Entrepreneurship" and a related communication class in a beautiful campus setting (the Istituti Filippin) in a small town about 50 miles from Venice. This is a great study abroad program run by a consortium of U.S. public universities and offers mostly classes in business, communication and journalism.

Students are mostly from b-schools but the liberal arts and engineering are represented as well. Faculty members are from all over the U.S., Canada, England and Italy. It’s week two and it’s begun, the Americans have started to grow restless… how is it possible that this could happen? We are in Italy, the mountains greet us every morning, the air is clear, the people friendly and the coffee great. The food, well, who needs to even mention it… it is Italy after all and I’ve picked up two kilos already. I need to walk more.

Well, I’ve not done a systematic investigation but I think my U.S. colleagues have been too long in a media saturated environment, they have begun to experience “tech withdrawal”… no broadband in the faculty flats? What? No English channels on TV? What? Well, maybe MTV… No wireless connections in the local cafes? No, Blockbuster on the corner? Come on! No DVD rentals in the Tabacchi? How will we ever know how the Presidential primary in Indiana turns out?

I don’t mean to say that we are not connected… we all have our cell phones and even in small town Italia there are satellite dishes and ESPN and BBC International, just not in our flats and of course only about 1% of Italian homes have cable television. It is true that many Italians have multiple mobile phones (I won’t go into why this is the case), each with a different ring which makes for interesting meals and all of our students use Skype, sometimes to call the next building.

So, how are my U.S. colleagues dealing with this perceived media impoverished environment? No, cable TV! No CNN! No Sports Center! Well, from my view it looks like they are putting in more time in the office, more care in course preparation, they are working more on that writing project they neglected at home, they are reading what novels they can find in English, they are spending more time with students and with other faculty here, and they are taking the occasional day off to go to Verona, Venice, Padua or Bassano… you know, it’s not all bad. There may be hope for us yet.