Life Aboard a Finnish Icebreaker

Monocle has produced a pair of videos about what Finland’s fleet of icebreakers do and what daily life is like for the crew.

In the second video, I was most interested in how life aboard icebreakers has changed now that wifi and personal TVs & DVD players are ubiquitous. Crew members are able to speak & video chat with their families daily (instead of every few weeks or months as in the past) and as a result, they feel less isolated and closer to their loved ones. But at the same time, access to the internet and TVs in each cabin results in less on-board socialization among the crew, which perhaps makes for a less tight-knit group. Extrapolating to society at large is left as an exercise to the viewer.

See also the Relaxing Sounds of an Arctic Icebreaker. (via why is this interesting?)

• Finland
• video