
New ‘Digital Divide’ Seen in Wasting Time Online - llambda
http://nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen-in-wasting-time-online.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
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ericabiz
Am I missing something?

From the article: "At home, _where money is tight_ , his family has two
laptops, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone." (emphasis
mine)

This is a family "where money is tight"?!

Whatever point the article is trying to make about the "digital divide" is
obscured if they believe that a poor family is one with two computers, two
game consoles, and where each kid has his/her own cell phone.

~~~
halo
Amortised across 5 years, that's less than £10/wk (2 laptops, a 360, a Wii, a
bunch of games and a phone with credit can be had for considerably less than
£2600).

Technology is a very cost-effective form of entertainment. Much better value
than going on holiday, going to restaurants or going to the cinema.

~~~
jerf
I find it vastly preferable to go the other direction, converting weekly or
monthly expenses into annualized sums. £10/week doesn't sound like much... but
£520/year is 2.6% of the post-tax annual median income in the UK [1]. I'm not
saying that's necessarily a bad way to spend that money, just that you're
better off thinking of it is as 2.6% of annual income. It's too easy to
£10/week this, £10/week that your way into overspending, but add up 4 of them
and see it as 10% of your income and you start to take notice.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom#Po...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom#Post_tax_household_income)
, with 20K at the 50th percentile

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drcube
My guess is that rich parents take their kids to the zoo and violin lessons
and what not, while poor kids have more time to waste on Facebook and Angry
Birds. Not too surprising or alarming if you ask me.

The real digital divide is between creators and consumers. I'd like to see
more effort to get kids to create with computers. Like programming, but also
writing, drawing, etc.

~~~
vannevar
Yes---I'd be willing to bet that similar pre-digital age studies showed poorer
children spent more time watching TV, hanging out with friends on street
corners and playing stick ball, while kids from wealthier families were
practicing the cello and going to Space Camp.

------
100k
Studies have shown a correlation between the ability to delay gratification as
a young child and future success in life
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment>).

Social media and video games are one of the most ingenius/insidious dopamine
releasers ever invented. It's not surprising kids prefer the dopamine hit
_now_ to hard work. (Don't we all?)

Well off children surely have problems with this too, but they have more of a
cushion to fall back on if they fail, and their parents are probably more
aware of the problem since they are more familiar with computers.

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_delirium
It would be nice to get the data from the study that's mentioned, if it's
available somewhere. What bits are parceled out in this article seem pretty
hard to interpret conclusively without more.

For example, they mention that children from less-educated families use
"media" 90 minutes/day more than those from better-educated families, but
don't break it down into which kind of media. In addition, "Kaiser double
counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously
watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours." This
could potentially have a large effect, but it's not mentioned how large. Are
children from less-educated families using media for more total time, or
multitasking more, or both? Or perhaps they're even using media for _less_
total time, but multitasking more? Or using it for _much_ more time, but
multitasking less? This double-counting metric doesn't make much sense to me
in the first place.

The causal conclusion about parents being "unable to monitor" their kids'
usage also seems like only one of many hypotheses. Another one is that kids
from less-educated families, which the article notes tend to be poorer, have
fewer alternative entertainment options available to them.

~~~
rapind
Double counting multitasking (second screen, etc.) puts the whole study in
question. Why on earth would this be relevant? All it does is skew the results
and exaggerate their conclusions.

The time I spent reading this article puts me firmly in the wasting time
category.

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yummyfajitas
tl;dr; Poor people are irresponsible and waste time on facebook, maybe rich
people do something different. The title suggests a digital divide, but the
body only discusses one side of it. Statistics are hinted at but not given.

~~~
hollerith
Yes, a pretty awful article about an (IMHO) important problem.

~~~
ticks
Article seems to be about user addiction, yet it skirts over the topic for
some reason.

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jl6
Technology is definitely a force amplifier, so I guess it's not surprising
that it will amplify pre-existing anti-patterns.

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enko
I think this is an interesting topic, but I have my doubts about the
methodology of this study:

> Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour
> simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted
> two hours.

It sounds to me that the so-called increase could be explained simply by the
addition of the internet, or ever present cell phones. If the average poor
person watched 3 hours a day of television in 1999, but now occasionally sends
a text or browses facebook during ads, it's now 6 hours?

10 years ago I noted an inverse correlation between socio-economic status and
time spent watching TV; now it's Facebook instead. Plus ça change, etc.

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abalashov
This is true of all media-related innovations. Once again, there isn't really
a new "problem" here, nor is this in any way novel. It's the usual
distribution among people.

Before computers and the Internet, ink, paper, typewriters, printing presses,
broadcast television and radio were mostly used for bread and circus, too, by
volume, despite the ways in which their development opened unprecedented new
mass-learning opportunities and lent itself to more "elevated" purposes.

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sanxiyn
Relevant: [http://www.halfsigma.com/2011/10/computers-education-and-
hbd...](http://www.halfsigma.com/2011/10/computers-education-and-hbd.html)

Quote: Probably it won't be too long before underperformance is blamed on the
presence of computers, which are after all a big distraction.

How true.

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garethsprice
Amusing that the article considers all social media use as "time-wasting" and
whatever undocumented things rich people do as non-timewasting.

The only conclusion from the study is that poor kids spend more time online,
the whole "digital divide"/"time wasting" thing is dubious editorial spin.

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KaoruAoiShiho
I think it's time we start taxing video gaming like we do real gaming.

