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Tuesday 28th November 2006 9:09 am
Ellen Seiter: Why Santa Brings Playstation, instead of a PC
There is a gaping home technology divide in this country. And Santa knows that one Christmas present can’t fix it, no matter how generous.
This Christmas season, Santa will bring Playstation to delighted kids in working class Black and Latino neighborhoods and deliver them to houses where the family cannot afford to keep a home computer and Internet connection working.
Santa will make principals and teachers really mad because they don’t think he should waste money on Playstation and Nintendo for homes without many books and no working printers and computers. How could Santa be thinking about video games when he should be concentrating on raising standardized test scores? (In my book, The Internet Playground (Peter Lang 2005) I discuss further how video games are often singled out by teachers as a shameful misuse of family money.)
There is a gaping home technology divide in this country. And Santa knows that one Christmas present can’t fix it, no matter how generous. But Playstation is more fun as a news item than the digital divide, so don’t expect to be reading a lot about it this holiday season.
Boring but important. That’s the headline over an article on “persisting racial disparities” in The Week dated Nov. 24, 2006, about the last Census report. White incomes are two thirds higher than blacks, and forty percent higher than Hispanics. 75% of whites own their homes, while only 46% of Blacks and 48% of Hispanics do. http://www.theweekmagazine
No wonder so many families can’t afford a PC.
Huge numbers of kids go to schools that cannot afford new technology and then come home to apartments where keeping the utilities on uses up the budget long before the family could get around to saving for expensive computers, software, and DSL lines. Playstation 3 is a bargain by comparison.
Do kids need home computers if they can use a PC at the library or at school? If you want to develop digital literacy skills that are robust and confident, you have to have open-ended access, a freedom from monitoring, all the time you want to use it (no one waiting in line to get on the computer) and a machine that you can tinker with, learn sequencing and change settings on the software, and explore the setups and preferences.
And that’s just what the Playstation provides kids with. Until Santa figures out how to make it Christmas twelve months a year, video games are probably the best he can do for kids without a PC.
Category: Ecology-of-Games, Unexpected
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Comments
http://dysplastic-brain.blogspot.com
Posted on December 2 2006 8:05 PM
Students at my school have a computer ownership adoption rate under the norm as we are a Title 1 school with a high free-and-reduced-lunch participation. However, my students think that the low rate of adoption may be due to something other than financial status.
A little over a week ago we were discussing this very subject and I asked for a Playstation versus computer hand count.
($110.00 and $115.00 - no tax, free shipping. Those are online prices today for barebones computers. Radio Shack has boxes starting at $125.00 today.)
It should come as no surprise that adoption depends on culture as much as anything at this point.
We believe that unless we can put a computer in front of every child in school instead of twenty five percent of them, they will not wish to adopt the technology.
Posted on December 3 2006 2:28 PM
I lost the carefully crafted reply when I tried to post, so bear with me on this abbreviated and impatient redo. If this ends up being a double post, pls accept my apology.
My point was that I had a slightly different take on this issue, albeit based only on limited experience. But that it seemed to have legs the more I thought about it. I don’t want to tell the long backstory of the relationship here, but the El Salvadoran woman who used to clean houses and now runs a very small startup company of her own, cleaning houses, asked me about purchasing a computer. Over the past few years I’ve been “liberating” computers for her and another woman from the obsolete-and-probably-won’t-be-missed pile of them at my workplace. Now, she wants to buy a new PC for Christmas so it run the media and apps. she and her children want to use.
She has a broken car and her husband is out of work due to injury. She has four children. She sends money home to El Savador. She has a limited formal education. She would qualify as “poor,” by any measure. Her concern in this purchase is not money, not the cost. It is the assistance, the ready support...in Spanish, in her neighborhood, easily accessible and comprehensible. It is a fear that PCs are hard for the average Joe and a realization that she has limited resources to spend on luxuries such as Computer Geeks who will rush to your home to help you out.
By contrast, the xbox, psp3, wii, are plug’n play and have always been advertised as such. Computers are sold with an image of elite mastery. They are “hard” and have “problems” and “support” is an important feature of the sale. They represent a financial risk and continuing cost.
In my experience, that psychological and financial gulf is much, much, wider than the actual income gulf. And no, this isn’t about Mac vs PC. (My husband can’t cope with his Mac on regular basis, not because he isn’t smart enough to, but because he believes he can’t and is very quick to seek help.) There is an industry built on the need for help with computers. Do you know of a comparable sector for the game console? For Vicki, free and easy help is available from me, but I don’t scale up very well.
http://www.centosforums.org
Posted on February 17 2008 11:38 PM
everything can run on linux these days
Taran Rampersad
KnowProSE.com
http://www.knowprose.com
Posted on November 28 2006 11:52 PM
Isn’t it odd that all of those game consoles can also run Linux?