How Class Stratification Affects At-Risk Children and Literacy Development: The New Digital Divide

• In Event: How the Hardening of the Class Stratification System Affects At-Risk Children and Literacy Development

Abstract

For today’s tweens, reading on the internet represents the confluence of language and technology—or new literacies—and requires specialized skills for accessing, producing and making rapid-fire responses. Using a complex intertwined set of symbols, icons, audio and virtual reality environments, this style of reading is pushing many other forms of media into obsolescence. Today, the sheer of mediated information that comes across the web, estimated to be about 1,000 words per minute (Neuman, 2010), has the potential to level the playing field, by increasing access to reading and information for students who live in poor neighborhoods compared to their middle-class peers.
This study reports a multi-year study, examining how tweens in two neighborhoods, one, in concentrated poverty (Wilson, 1987); the other, in concentrated affluence, use the internet, and whether the promise of greater access to print and information has transformed reading behavior. As part of a 10-year study, a team of urban ethnographers in 1998 through a set of ethnographic strategies examined tween reading behavior, prior to the introduction of computers and internet, in the local public library in both neighborhoods. Using frozen time checks that counted all activities over 80 hours in each library, thick description, and followed by momentary time samples, they reported the percent of time spent reading, reading-related activities, ‘hanging out, as well as number of lines of print, print genre (narrative, expository etc..) for students in each neighborhood. Ten years later, in 2009, similar strategies were used to measure reading behavior, in these libraries that now had full use of computers and internet.
The results of our study indicated a new form of digital divide. Students in the neighborhood of concentrated poverty have limited access to internet and computers outside of school; consequently the demands for these resources at the library have far out-stripped those in neighborhoods of affluence. These different demands for use of the internet affect how tween use these resources; with limited time available, tweens in the poor neighborhood used the internet for entertainment, rather than information; read significantly fewer lines of print, and were less facile in reading on the internet to complete homework assignments, compared to their peers in the middle-income neighborhood where home computers and lap tops were ubiquitous. Momentary time sampling of behaviors indicated that tweens in the middle-income neighborhood were reading three times as fast as those in the low-income neighborhood, and using more challenging materials. Consequently, although tweens in both neighborhoods may be benefiting from these resources, the speed of access to information (in particular) may be exacerbating the knowledge gap rather than closing it. These results have significant educational implications for development of information capital.

Authors

• Donna Celano, La Salle University

• Susan B. Neuman, New York University