Saturday, April 21, 2012

I want to start this blog with a subject that has been bugging many, within the Italian and Italian-American community, for years, and every years that goes by it becomes more and more of a serious matter, it's gaining size  at an almost geometrical way... well I exaggerated by saying geometrical way, however, it is creating more concern as time passes by. What worries mostly this community is it's heritage that slowly and relentlessly is disappearing, it is inevitably being absorbed by the American system and the true traditions are becoming sparse, occasional and in most of the cases not so genuine as they used to be. Why? This is the question that is keeping figures of the community awake. Why? Why? Why it doesn't go through? And the answer to that is "the younger generation...", "they're not ready...", "they don't know how..."  and so on. The Italian-American community is spread all over the ares, I am talking about Southern California, but the situation in Northern California is not so different, it is composed of groups of people that more or less are regular participants of social events mostly promoted by small organizations, a sort of social network, but not on the Internet, this is a live social network with thousands of people meeting sometimes on a regular base. They were created to keep the group of Italian Immigrant together, times were different then and being together helped fight for their right, yes those were troubled time back then and a solution had to be found. It came naturally, as it usually does when one is alone in a foreign country he tends to look for his "paesani", nevertheless the plan worked, and worked well until the new generation became adult and aware of the situation and they handled it well. Now here comes Internet and all communication barriers are broken. Letter that used to take weeks to reach you, with airplanes were received in days, then telephone reduced it to hours and now with internet it takes seconds. At he speed of light your signal travels from your computer to reach another computer on a remote area, from there it is launched to a satellite orbiting at thousands of miles in space, then to an other satellite that shoots is to a remote computer on the other side of the globe, and finally to you... in just few seconds and to anywhere in the world. The newest generation does not need to go to 'live social networks' events, they have the worlds traditions in the palm of their hands!