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The Poor Waste More Time On Digital Entertainment
New submitter polyphydont writes "Children of parents with low social status are less able to resist the temptations of technological entertainment, a fact that impedes their education and adds to the obstacles such children face in obtaining financial comfort later in life. As explained in the article, poor parents and their children often waste both their time and money on heavily marketed entertainment systems. Such families often accumulate PCs, gaming consoles and smart phones, but use them only for nonconstructive activities."
FTFA:
In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show
In other words, a bunch of do-gooders gave a bunch of computers to the noble savages who live in that neighborhood that they avoid on the way to work, assuming that these ignorant natives would use this wonderful new device to rise up out of the ghettos and become good middle-class liberals. Only the do-gooders were distressed to learn that instead of getting their degrees online and reading academic papers, their beneficiaries instead chose to use their new machines to watch nut-shot YouTube videos and play Farmville. So now they're seeking a way to force these foolish ingrates to use their computers the way the do-gooders know they're supposed to.
Who would have thought that giving a computer to someone who lives in a shithole neighborhood, with little in the way of safe local entertainment, would choose to use it for online entertainment, huh? We must educate them on the proper way to use a computer before they find Facebook and start messaging our daughters instead of using Kahn Academy courses to learn algebra!
Next you'll be telling me that the kids in the One Laptop Per Child program traded their laptops for food rather than using them to learn the Queen's English!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Such families often accumulate PCs, gaming consoles and smart phones, but use them only for nonconstructive activities.
Find me a constructive activity to do with gaming consoles and smart phones. Stack them up like blocks? Practice marksmanship? Learn circuit bending?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Waste and spend are two entirely different things.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
and again...
Being poor in America is definitely a weird thing...
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I've observed that many affluent people spend great deals of cash on sporting goods, expensive hobbies, and out-of-home entertainment.
It's not like they're all buying computers and then using them for productivity.... it's just that a great deal of more productive, healthy, or useful activities are still much more expensive than cheap TVs, cheap computers, and cheap video games.
It's not like the rich people stare at the wall all day instead of playing video games.
Seriously - while the ghetto dad is playing with his $200 XBox, the rich dads are riding $2000 bikes with $3000 worth of shiny spandex.
The other thing is, the whole concept of what's "wasted." If you're 8 years old, your mom is either always on pot, crack, or hanging out with the new boyfriend of the week, if you live in a neighborhood where going outside is dangerous, and nobody but Elmo or Cookie Monster ever gave enough of a shit about you to contribute to helping you learn to read, be creative, or anything else, then why wouldn't you spend your time playing Xbox? If that were me, I'd welcome the escapism it offered. Playing XBox may well be the single best part of your life.
In order to tell me that time was wasted, you have to tell me the opportunity cost of what (realistic, achieveable) activity could otherwise have been done.
People have different degrees of impulse control. The ones with good control of their impulses tend to do better then the ones with poor control of their impulses.
On NPR they were talking about the Marshmallow test. Where kids were place in front of a plate with a Marshmallow on it. They were told you can eat that Marshmallow now, however if you wait for 15 minutes you can have two.
They tracked the children threw adulthood. The ones who waited to get two on the average achieved more then the ones who just took one right away.
When you spend money on the quick fix you are trading off time for the long term goal.
If this is a genetic trait, or a learned trait is up to interpretation, however it comes down to, if you grow up in a family who is poor because the parents lack impulse control, then either genetically or as a learned habit it will be passed to the next generation, who will then live in poverty.
It isn't about how hard they work, some work very hard, much harder then the rest of us, it isn't that their are stupid either, some of them are very intelligent. However if you cannot control your impulse to buy the quick fix, you will not be saving up for higher value things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In other words - people who are too lazy to "get ahead" will spend some of their laziness on electronic doodads when they have the opportunity to do so. Who would have guessed?
And before you jump on the "too lazy" part of what I just said - if you're poor or down & out, and you're playing XBOX instead of going to the library to learn whatever, or you spend the money on an XBOX instead of something that would provide you with the knowledge to get ahead, then yes, you're lazy.
For most people, getting ahead takes hard work. It's a lot easier to seek out entertainment than the knowledge and skills required to get ahead. This article seems to be right in line with what most people would expect.
It's a nice thought. But we're mostly talking about people playing Madden and Halo all day on a console, and watching YouTube and texting other people with similar interests on their phone.
There is this idea that "computers", as an abstract concept, are a way to improve education. We see this all the time; most recently, states are pouring huge amounts of money into putting laptop computers into the hands of every student. It seems that people seldom ask why we're doing this. Why are we doing this? Well, it's self-evident that computers make education better, right? At least, that's the way we've been treating the issue. We don't have enough people asking in what ways, specifically, computers will improve education.
So this article is about the result of that way of thinking. Today, even the poorer kids have access to technology in their homes. And, obviously, they play video games with the technology instead of sitting in front of the computer and thinking great thoughts and composing essays and multimedia presentations in their spare time. But the article is full of people who express surprise at this. They are mystified that putting computers into kids' hands didn't magically make them into better students and deeper thinkers.
As has been said in this forum many times before, a computer is merely a tool. There is absolutely no reason why you should expect a student to suddenly become a great learner simply because you handed him a computer, any more than you would expect him to complete his education on his own if you handed him a pile of K-12 textbooks. Someone in charge has to stop and ask the right questions, if we want computers to really help in education. Someone has to stop and ask why and how we expect computers to help, and then implement a plan that actually makes that happen. Because right now, we're just funneling a lot of money into facebook machines for students.
Perhaps people of a lower social status feel the need to escape more so than people who have an easier life? If you live in a crappy environment, are you surprised that you want to spend 10 hours a day pretending you're a valiant knight in Skyrim or being swept up in "Adventure Time" where anything can happen?
Other possible answers include that better off families are more likely to do other things that cost more money. Or that better off parents are more likely to have a day off to take the kids out somewhere (possibly somewhere educational, possibly not)..
It might even be that better schools in wealthier neighborhoods have more worthwhile extracurricular activities.
The thing about digital entertainment is that once you have the media, it costs no more money to spend another hour with it.
I can't ever recall anyone asking for this information for any other reason than to use it to smear someone.
You don't need to know because it doesn't matter, you WANT to know because you think you can then go "AHA YOU SUPPORT TEAM BLUE YOU'RE A _____" or "I KNEW IT, YOU SUPPORT TEAM RED, YOU ARE A _______"
You want to know because it will allow you to avoid addressing the actual issues, and frankly, YOU and those like YOU are what's wrong with politics in this country.
It's entirely possible to address his position without knowing anything else about him.
An Xbox is the real baseball and real glove equivalent that normal kids play with today.
A home theater to play it in is the uniform equivalent that rich kids play in.
Nethack, dungeonCrawl, NewGrounds, Wesnoth, game demos, and pirated games are the stick equivalent that poor kids play with.
Welcome to the digital era.