Internet Phone Service: Convenient, But at What Cost?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 03.12.07 | 1:36 PM ET
Photo by ling883 via flickr (Creative Commons).
When somebody dials Clifford J. Levy’s telephone number in Brooklyn, the call is immediately forwarded to St. Petersburg, Russia. For Levy, who now resides in St. Petersburg, that’s generally a good thing. For a modest monthly fee, he can dial up his family back home, and when his daughter gets lonely in Russia, she can call friends in New York, too—all thanks to an Internet phone service. But as much as he loves the convenience of it, Levy wonders about the drawbacks, and not just when the telemarketers call in the middle of the night, which happens to be dinner time in New York. “In the past, cut off from your old life, you may have tried harder to immerse yourself in your new one,” he writes in the New York Times. “That was part of the allure of being an expatriate: learning a new language, overcoming isolation by trying to cultivate friends among the locals, making daily discoveries about another part of the world.” Now, he adds, that’s just more difficult to do.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
