Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
I didn't see anywhere in the article where they called that a fact. Conversely, the article seems to explain it to be a correlation and, if this concerned me, I would be more worried about the overall growing trend regardless of social status. From the article:
A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.
The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.
Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.)
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?
As explained in the article, poor parents and their children often waste both their time and money on heavily marketed entertainment systems.
The funny thing is that if you look it as dollar spent per hour enjoyed, it's not a waste of money. It's actually much more affordable than taking your kid on a field trip or sailing or even to the movies. Hell, football pads and gear probably cost more than a Wii with games. I agree that the kids should spend more time visiting the library but as someone who grew up underneath the poverty line, I feel like this interpretation of this study was pretty shallow. I mean, if you're concerned about poor people spending money on video games, why aren't you demanding we outlaw the lottery and gambling? Numbers-wise it's not rich people who enjoy those stupid, expensive habits.
My work here is dung.
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.
Don't forget the lottery!
It's the math tax, you know.
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.
While what Matt Ritchel writes in his NY Times article does raise an issue worth discussing, I have two issues with what he writes. The first is that he fails to mention that this pattern mirrors long-standing patterns of media consumption. Media reports, including those by Pew, the Kaiser Family Foundation (and many others) indicate correlations between consumption and SES (socio-economic status). The presumption is that exposure to media is counerproductive. Which brings me to my second point: the assumption that exposure to media is counterproductive. Matt mentions several students in his article; they indicate that they're falling victim to "media overuse", missing homework and not getting enough sleep. But what's much harder to measure is the value that media users ARE gaining from using media, including Facebook, for their activities. As an example, we see a workplace shift toward hiring workers with 'social marketing' and 'online' skills; and it's no question that big companies are betting on "Social CRM", including the king of CRM, Salesforce. So, it's absolutely possible that using Facebook - overusing, some might say - is actually aiding its users gain in the online social skills they'll need to succeed in the future. But all of this doesn't detract from a central point about media consumption, and that is, that it's at the expense of Other Things: like playing hide and seek, running, gardening, etc - many of the active things that help humans be socially, physically and mentally healthy in ways that interaction with a computer can't. So, all in all, it's a thick question -- Matt does do something important by raising the issue, so KUDOS for that. The question, now, is what we all learn from the dialogue. Cheers, --Dave / PLML
They make poor decisions (such as spending $110 a month for unlimited cellphone service) and thus continue to be poor. While those who make smarter decisions, like investing the $110 in a business, and climb up the income ladder to middle class.
*
*I used the example based on someone I know. Doesn't even know how to use the internet, but still "had" to have a $110/month plan. Meanwhile the credit cards go unpaid.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
Isn't that one of the key characterisrics of the middle class? Deferred gratification leading to inter generational wealth transfer is the reason why some of my friends have had houses bought for them by their parents. I don't think this story has anything to do with technology - just the different attitudes to money that exist at various levels of society. On the other hand, this is a huge generalisation. I also have friends who are far less well off than I am who are carrying a fraction of what I am in unsecured debt due to their traditional working class aversion to borrowing money.
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.
Introduction to such devices and the information they can access might lead to FREE THINKING!
Baaaaaad.
They also might become curious about how it works which leads to learning what is under the hood... and that will prevent them from being mindless consumers of corporate informational garbage and they might even become PRODUCERS of information. How can you convince them that Obama is a communist then??
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.
Granted, very few people are setting up their own social networks
For one thing, people set up their own web forums all the time. For another, that could change if development of Diaspora gains momentum. Do you think that's gonna happen?
Reminds me some years ago when a city councilman wanted to significantly reduce number of liquor stores. He said poorer areas of city have higher concentration of such stores enticing poor people to spend money on liquor and cigarettes. He also pointed out there are many more billboards for these products in lower income neighborhoods, and then policy makers wonder why poor people waste so much time of cigs and booze. For me, I think number of stores should be reduced (I admit I've not done statistical surveys to see if poor neighborhoods have higher concentration liquor stores than wealthy). But lots of luck implementing because people will scream guvmint regulations/interference/socialism (or whatever govt gripe of the month) destroying our choice of how we want to live.
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
I got to do a lot of cool things as a kid but looking back at them the reason it was possible was my family had a reasonable bit of money. It wasn't all that cheap. Even simple things like a day at the museum that is like $50 for two kids and an adult, never mind food or any extras. That is amusing and educational, but for one day max, and realistically you probably don't stay all day. Well $50 will nearly get you a video game (most are $60 these days). Less used or on sale on Steam or something. That can entertain you for days on end.
So if a family doesn't have much money, it isn't hard to see why they'd choose games over museum visits, even if they understand it would be better educationally.
Hell I am setting up our labs (at a university) for a summer program for high school and middle school students right now. Cool summer engineering academy thing. Looks like it would be pretty fun and educational for geek type kids. However, it costs money. I don't know the details, that isn't my area, but only people who can pay, probably a fair bit (couple hundred is my guess) can get in.
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.
I couldn't find the study earlier, but here is a pretty good writeup of the effect:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all
"Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation."
I don't disagree that regular exercise of willpower can have positive effects, though.
Iff there's something reasonably productive you could be doing.