Living & Arts

Studying abroad in the uncanny cultural valley

Studying-abroad-in-the-uncanny-cultural-valley

Carey Pietsch | Phoenix Staff

In print | October 22, 2009

This morning, I was standing on my balcony drinking a cup of coffee and marveling at the serenity of Oxford at 8 a.m. when the fire alarm went off, causing me to drop my mug onto the grass twenty feet below and scramble to figure out what could possibly be going on that could make such an ungodly noise so early in the morning.

And that’s a lot like how the last three weeks have been — moments when everything seems to be working out just fine, followed by bursts of cataclysmic, earth-shattering realization that nothing is as it seems. Looking back on my last column where I was scared that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with British university students, I’m now left wondering, what the hell was I thinking? I haven’t had a spare minute to find a British university student to strike up a conversation with, because every single moment of my day is spent struggling to keep my head above the rising tide of British-ness that threatens my very existence.

But when I actually sit down and think about it, the experience of being totally disoriented doesn’t make much sense, because, superficially, nothing is all that different. Sure, British electrical plugs are the size of a fist and look like medieval torture devices, and sure, transacting in cash in the UK necessitates the use of an array of coins that appear to have no rhyme or reason guiding their diameter, color, shape or thickness and that range in value from 1 pence to 2 pounds — but really, those are all small details in the grand scheme of things.

(To go back to the coin issue for a second, when you think about it, a £2 coin is worth close to $4. Once I got over the shock of coins being useful for more than laundry, that realization left me wondering what kind of podunk economy actually uses a coin worth $4? The Sacagawea dollar, the laughingstock of American currency, was bad enough. And now I can buy a drink from Starbucks with a single coin that, conveniently, is about the size of a dinner plate. Have you no self-respect, Bank of England? Print some bills and be done with it.)

So why does everything feel so completely unfamiliar when, ostensibly, it should be a pretty minor adjustment? I’m starting to think that I’ve fallen into the Uncanny Valley of International Travel. And what’s that? Well…

In 1970, a Japanese robotics researcher named Masahiro Mori wrote about a phenomenon he called the “uncanny valley.” His hypothesis was that as humanoid robots become increasingly “human” in their movements and appearance, they become correspondingly familiar to the people watching them — to a point.

There’s a level of similarity just shy of verisimilitude where things that are really, really close to human become incredibly creepy. For example, “The Polar Express” is widely regarded as a disturbing movie, not because Christmas is inherently that frightening, but because the computer-generated people fall into the uncanny valley and look “off.” There’s nothing technically wrong with them — and in fact, the CGI work in the film is, by the books, fantastic — but some viewers invariably hate watching the movie. By contrast, a much more stylized animated film like “The Incredibles“ is fine, because it’s far enough away from the valley that we don’t find Mr. Incredible threatening to our humanity.

And I think that international travel works basically the same way. I came to the U.K. expecting to find superficial cultural differences, but a society that, logistically speaking, functioned mostly in the same way as the United States. I wasn’t prepared for an adjustment on the order of spending a semester in Nepal, because, logically, it shouldn’t be as challenging to become acclimated to the fairly posh, suburban and tame Oxford as it would be to find my way in Kathmandu. But as these first few weeks have shown, it’s my assumptions about the similarities between England and the States that makes living here so disconcerting. Things just don’t work as expected.

For instance, while my patch of gray hair doubled in size my first day in England when none of the electric outlets in my room seemed to work, the cause was as simple as neglecting to turn on the switch above every socket. Obvious, but unintuitive (from an American perspective) and, ultimately, hugely frustrating.

Laundry, too, has been a challenge. Not only is it a good deal more expensive than at Swarthmore — the next time you want to complain about 75¢ for a washing machine, remember that I have to pay £1.20 (about $2) per load, washer or dryer, and that their prissy little British washing machines that hold, at most, one pair of jeans and a sock before they squeal in discomfort and refuse to clean anything — but the names and varieties of detergent available are completely nonsensical. Liquid laundry detergent as such seems not to exist. But you’d never know that, because fabric softener has totally illogical names like “conditioner” and “cleanser” that dupe you into buying huge bottles of lavender-scented liquid that does absolutely nothing to clean dirty clothing.

Moreover, apparently England has “hard water,” a concept that no one here is able to cogently explain to me, which causes even older, color-stable clothing to bleed unless exactly the right type of detergent is used. And of course, since the idea of a store that carries all the useful shit you need for your everyday life in one place (say, Target or WalMart) hasn’t arrived on this side of the Atlantic yet, finding that correct detergent requires trips to four different grocery stores and a half-dozen convenience stores with names like Boots or Boswell’s and that carry, inexplicably, hair straighteners and tangerines but eschew far more frivolous items like umbrellas or color-safe hard water laundry detergent. And we haven’t even touched on the fact that the fairly small city of Oxford contains two completely separate and competing bus companies that operate frustratingly similar routes but allow absolutely no interchange. Oh, and bus passes are purchased in the home goods section of the Oxford department store, Debenham’s, behind the wet-dry vacuums and next to the Calvin Klein bedding. Obviously.

It reaches a point where, even though I can read all the signs and understand what all the people are saying, I feel like a majority of what’s taking place around me is going totally over my head.
England, it turns out, is familiar enough to put you at ease, right up until the moment where your non-hard-water-safe fabric softener fucks up a load of laundry and you realize that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.

That’s the point where I learned that if was going to survive here, I had to stop thinking of the U.K. as a slightly quirkier U.S. and start treating it like the completely alien territory that it really is. Once I started to embrace that idea, everything started to become a good deal easier. Or at the very least, a little less frustrating.

Yoel is a junior. He can be reached at yroth1@swarthmore.edu. Additional stories of abject incompetence can be found on his blog, yoyoel.com.