My latest paper for COMM 601 Social Networking:
In March 2009 I went on a service trip to Tobati, Paraguay, in central South America. For nearly two weeks, we worked on projects such as building schools and medical facilities, distributing clothing and other items to people in need, and interacting with civic leaders, educators, and all sorts of folks.
What we, 20 American chaperones and 100 American high school students, didn’t have were smartphones or high-speed Internet connections. There was one Internet café in Tobati that offered a super-slow dialup connection (for a dollar a half-hour). In Paraguay’s capital city of Asuncion, we had access to a better-connected Internet kiosk, but nothing close to the speed of your typical Comcast broadband link in the United States.
On three occasions I used those Internet connections to check e-mail and read a bit of news. I wasn’t connected to the World Wide Web as I usually am, and I curiously found that I didn’t miss it a whole lot.
I thought about my time on that trip as we watched the Frontline documentary “Digital Nation,” which explored a number of topics related to how we use technology today, and what exactly the rampant multitasking, Web surfing, texting, and video watching and recording that up-and-coming generations favor is causing them (and older people, too) to gain and lose in terms of learning, development, and focus.
The documentary was very interesting, and entertaining, but I think it tried to cover too much. It lacked depth. We got a lot of sound bites and frankly alarmist perspectives (particularly on segments covering secondary and higher education, the military, and at the South Korean Internet “detox” camp), without the sort of back-and-forth arguments that might have put those segments into better perspective. Those interviewed for the documentary make declarative statements, opinions really, that were just sort of allowed to dangle. I found this most prominent in the comments on how students today are missing out by focusing so much on digital communication.
Fortunately, the Frontline Web site offers much more nuance than the documentary itself did. I found a “roundtable” bulletin board-style discussion of the participants to be particularly useful. In that discussion, James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University and author of “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” described a blind spot in the documentary that I noticed as well:
“There is also an important issue missed by the show and that is the question of how people from different social and economic groups use and benefit (or not) from digital media,” Gee writes. “I guess it is not surprising that American TV does not much deal with class issues, but there is little doubt that digital media are leveraged by some families to great benefit for their children in school as part of a larger learning and literacy ecology that includes digital media and print. Other families use digital media in quite different ways. Indeed, there are many different uses with many different outcomes — my simple dichotomy really will not do, but it raises the issue of equity and outcomes for diverse people in our society (and, indeed, world).”
That’s an accurate criticism and points out a huge issue that goes largely unaddressed in the documentary (we never see the homes of the students at the tech-heavy New York school profiled, for example). Socioeconomic status affects a young person’s access to technology in the home and at school. And that brings to mind my trip to impoverished South America, and how that digital divide is felt in places that don’t have easy access to the Internet.
Frontline “Digital Nation” site.
My knoxnews.com story on trip to Tobati, Paraguay.
