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Beispielaufgaben aus demWettbewerb 2013 

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Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era5Quelle: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen-in-wasting-time-online.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all, By MATT RICHTEL, Published: May 29, 2012 

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.

Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side10effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the

government now wants to fix.

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, studies15

show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflectionof the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access

to it.

The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission20

that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps.

This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and

libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizationslike the Boys and Girls Club, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the25

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial

support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes

from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft.

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 day30

exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the

difference was just 16 minutes.

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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 day35

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 1999.40

“Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education

or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure

entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of

closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”

The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-45

year-old in Oakland who loves technology.

At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo

Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting

and playing games.

He particularly likes playing them on the weekends.50

“I stay up all night, until like 7 in the morning,” he said, laughing sheepishly. “It’s why I’m

so tired on Monday.”

His grades are suffering. His grade-point average is barely over 1.0, putting him at the

bottom of his class. He wants to be a biologist when he grows up, he said.

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