Traveling away from home can be a difficult thing to do at a young age.

But as technology grows, it makes it easier for young travelers like foreign exchange students Marten Laudi and Ngoch Banh. However, some who traveled decades ago say easy communication to home can corrupt the cultural experience.

Thirty years ago, Spanish teacher Pat Wittry traveled to Costa Rica to study abroad.

“It took about at least a week to receive a letter from back home,” Wittry said.

Wittry believes if you can separate yourself from social media, you’re going to put yourself in an experience that can change you.

“With Skype and Facebook, it’s harder to get into the culture they’re in,” she said. “People resist change, so they travel and a lot of times look for things that are familiar so they feel more comfortable.”

French teacher Megan Hurt said electronic media has changed everyone’s lives — not just people studying abroad.

“I would go on a foreign exchange writing letters, because when you’re more isolated from your everyday life, your life back in the states, you’re much more likely to ensconce yourself in the culture at hand,” she said.

When Hurt studied abroad in Paris, it would sometimes take as long as a month to receive mail because France was known for its mail strikes.

“Times have changed, so using social medias aren’t so much a choice now,” Hurt said.

Laudi, a junior from Germany, said he talks to his friends on Facebook two or three times a week and calls his family every two or three weeks.

“Without social medias, it might prevent me from traveling abroad,” he said. “It’s very hard, and I would only have a telephone which is very expensive.”

Laudi says that the downside to social media is that you’re so connected to friends in your own country that you don’t make as many friends in the United States.

Banh, a foreign exchange student from China, talks to her friends daily online and talks to her parents every weekend.

She says she would feel homesick without that communication, which would make it difficult for her to know what was going on back in her own country.

“These social medias are addicting,” Banh said, “But they’ve also helped me make more friends here.”