Tag Archives: Digitalisation

Thank You for Your Attention: Of the Unending Struggle with Digital Distractions

By Nina Preußler

How many hours have you already spent look­ing at a screen today? Nowa­days, the uni­ver­sal answer to this ques­tion seems to be “too much.” As the inter­net becomes more deeply ingrained in every aspect of our lives, it gets trick­i­er and trick­i­er to find respon­si­ble ways of engag­ing with the online world with­out get­ting lost in it. This issue became even more chal­leng­ing for many peo­ple dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, for exam­ple, found that young peo­ple now spend an aver­age of 7.7 hours of their dai­ly free time in front of screens – twice as much as they did pre-COVID. Why is the inter­net so wicked­ly tempt­ing, and how can we estab­lish health­i­er dig­i­tal habits?

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Teen Nonprofits Find Solutions during Covid-19 Pandemic

By Anvitha Reddy, Charlotte Heuser, and Emma Dircks

Pho­to Cred­it: The Young-ish Entre­pre­neurs by SDI Productions/Getty Images

In the mid­dle of a Covid-19 lock­down packed with dis­tance learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties, teach­ers at the Schmal­ka­lden Ele­men­tary School in Thuringia, Ger­many, learned that the dig­i­tal tool they had been using didn’t meet the country’s strict data-pri­va­cy restric­tions. “A par­ent at the school asked whether I could devel­op a pro­gram from scratch over the week­end,” said Math­ias Wick­en­hagen, a 20-year-old pro­gram­mer in the neigh­bor­hood. “And I did.”

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