The App Generation

The App Generation

HOWARD GARDNER
AND KATIE DAVIS

HOW TODAY
'
S YOUTH
NAVIGATE IDENTITY, INTIMACY,
AND IMAGINATION IN
A DIGITAL WORLD

Copyright © 2013 by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] (US office) or [email protected] (UK office).

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Sabon type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gardner, Howard, 1943–

The app generation : how today's youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world / Howard Gardner and Katie Davis.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN
978-0-300-19621-4 (hardback)

1. Internet and youth. 2. Youth—Social networks. 3. Technology and youth. 4. Identity (Psychology) 5. Creative ability in adolescence. 6. Application software. I. Davis, Katie (Assistant professor). II. Title.

HQ
799.9.
I
58
G
37 2013      004.67′980835—dc23

2013017948

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI
/
NISO
Z
39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Judy Dimon
Who conceived of this project
Supported it generously
and
Always posed timely questions

Preface

ONE
Introduction

TWO
Talk about Technology

THREE
Unpacking the Generations: From Biology to Culture to Technology

FOUR
Personal Identity in the Age of the App

FIVE
Apps and Intimate Relationships

SIX
Acts (and Apps) of Imagination among Today's Youth

SEVEN
Conclusion: Beyond the App Generation

Methodological Appendix

Notes

Index

T
HIS BOOK IS THE
happy product of a long-standing research program, a pair of new questions, and a wonderfully fortuitous collaboration. For many years, Howard's research group at Harvard Project Zero has been studying the development in children and adolescents of cognitive mastery and an ethical orientation. Around 2006, our group began to address two new questions. Prompted by the research agenda enabled by Jonathan Fanton at the MacArthur Foundation, we began to study how the new digital media were affecting the ethical compass of young users. At roughly the same time, we began an extended, broader conversation with Judy Dimon about the ways in which young people's thought processes, personalities, imaginations, and behaviors might be affected and perhaps radically transformed by their involvement with these media.

When one launches a new project, one cannot anticipate the answers that will be forthcoming or the form that the answers
will take. Katie Davis's research interests in the emerging identities of young persons stimulated her to study the blogs kept by young persons and then to undertake a dissertation on the sense of identity of young people in her home country of Bermuda. At an early point in her doctoral studies Katie joined the research group directed by Carrie James and Howard, and almost magically, a joint agenda and writing project emerged. Once we realized that today's young people could be revealingly described as the App Generation, it was clear that we needed to write this book. And given the willingness of Katie's sister Molly and of Howard's grandchild Oscar to speak with the authors, the beginning and the end of the book—covering a span of several generations—essentially wrote itself. We authors are responsible for the intervening pages.

We were fortunate to have a great deal of help with this book project. Special thanks to Carrie James, our indispensable partner in research for the past seven years. We are also grateful to our talented and dedicated research team at Harvard Project Zero, including Margaret Rundle, Celka Straughn, Margaret Weigel, and Emily Weinstein, and for more limited periods Marc Aidinoff, Zach Clark, Donna DiBartolomeo, Emma Heeschen, and Emily Kaplan. These colleagues contributed to all aspects of the research, from study design and participant recruitment to interviewing and data analysis. We have also benefited from a tremendous support staff in Howard's office: Kirsten Adam, Victoria Nichols, and Danny Mucinskas.

Katie's sister Molly was an enthusiastic and thoughtful collaborator
throughout our writing, providing a valuable perspective as we reflected on the defining characteristics of the App Generation. And, while not directly involved in this project, Katie's other sister, Alaire (just one year older than Molly), was also present in our thoughts as we stitched together the three-generation narrative that runs throughout the book.

Thank you to our many interview and focus group participants, well over one hundred persons. We appreciate your willingness to spend time with us and engage our questions thoughtfully. We also wish to thank those who helped us to coordinate these interviews and focus groups, including Themis Dimon, Mary Skipper, and Shirley Veenema.

We are very grateful to Nancie Atwell, Anne Gisleson, and John and Stephanie Meyer for providing us with access to a treasure trove of art and fiction written by youth over the preceding twenty years. We were hoping to include examples of the artwork we analyzed in the pages of this book, but unfortunately we were unable to contact all of the artists to obtain their permission.

With respect to the Bermuda-based research, Katie wishes to thank the Ministry of Education and school principals for taking an interest in her research and providing access to their schools.

Others have also helped us with various aspects of the book. We thank Michael Connell, Andrew Gardner, and Justin Reich for valuable suggestions. As careful readers of the whole manuscript, we are particularly grateful to Larry Friedman, Carrie James, and Ellen Winner.

At Yale University Press, we thank particularly our editor, Eric Brandt, our manuscript editor, Laura Jones Dooley, and our publicist, Elizabeth Pelton. The whole, often challenging process of launching and steering a book project was made immeasurably easier by Hope Denekamp, Jill Kneerim, and Ike Williams of the Kneerim Williams Literary Agency.

Finally, our work wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of Judy and Jamie Dimon, as well as Jonathan Fanton, Robert Gallucci, Julie Stasch, and Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation.

On a sunny though chilly day in March 2012, the two authors, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, initiated a lengthy conversation with Katie's sister Molly. Ten years earlier, Katie, then in her early twenties, had begun to study with Howard, then in his late fifties. Since then they have collaborated on numerous research and writing projects, including this book. At the time of the conversation, held in Howard's office at Harvard, Molly, aged sixteen, was a junior at an independent school in New England.

Why did Howard and Katie hold and record this conversation? Since 2006, we and our fellow researchers have been examining the role technology plays in the lives of young people, often dubbed “digital natives” because they have grown up immersed in the hardware and software of the day. As researchers, we have used a variety of empirical methods to
ferret out what might be the special—indeed, defining—quality of today's young people. But we came to realize that if we were to make statements, or draw conclusions, about what is
special
about digital youth today, we required key points of comparison.

Being opportunistic as well as empirical, we realized that our very own family configurations provided one comparative lens—as well as a literary device—through which to observe and chronicle the changes across the generations. Howard—on any definition of that slippery term, a “digital immigrant”—grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania in the 1950s, at a time when one could still count the number of computers in the world. Born in Canada and raised in Bermuda, Katie grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During her early childhood, her Bermuda home had just one television station (CBS), which eventually expanded to three (CBS, ABC, NBC). In the mid-1990s, her parents finally installed cable at their home. Katie's access to computers was limited to once-weekly classes in the computer lab at school. In sharp contrast, Molly, who has lived in Bermuda and the United States, cannot remember a time without desktops, laptops, mobile phones, or the Internet. Wedded to her smartphone, this prototypical digital native spent her adolescence deeply immersed in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking communities. And so our conversation across the generations—and subsequent communications among the three of us—catalyzed comparisons of three dramatically different relations to the technologies of the time.

Although our conversation ranged widely, three topics emerged as dominant and also permeate this book: our sense of personal
identity,
our
intimate
relationships to other persons, and how we exercise our creative and
imaginative
powers (hereafter, the three Is). To be sure, the nature of our species has not changed fundamentally over time. And yet we maintain that, courtesy of digital technologies, Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination have each been reconfigured significantly in recent decades. Signs of these changes can be discerned in our conversation.

As the dominant (though slightly waning) online community among both Molly's and Katie's peer groups, Facebook was a recurrent topic of discussion. Though they are Facebook friends, the sisters employ the popular social networking site in different ways. Having joined as an adult in her late twenties, Katie uses Facebook intermittently to stay connected to friends and family living across Canada, the United States, and Bermuda. For Molly, Facebook represents a far more integral part of her daily experience. Since she joined at the age of twelve, Facebook has represented a vital social context throughout her formative adolescent years.

In describing her use of and experiences on Facebook, Molly touched on a practice among some of her peers that made an immediate and striking impression on both Howard and Katie. As is the case at just about every high school, one group of students at Molly's school are considered the
popular kids. The girls are attractive and the boys play varsity sports like lacrosse and soccer. Most of the varsity boys are seniors, but a few stand-out athletes are freshmen. A while back, Molly noticed that some of the senior girls who were dating senior boys started to show up on her Facebook newsfeed as being “married.” Only they were married, not to their actual boyfriends, but to the freshmen boys who played on the same sports team (!).

“The popular senior girls pick out a freshman guy who is cute and popular and probably going to be really attractive when he's older. They'll kind of adopt him, and then take pictures with him, write on his wall, and flirt with him in a joking sort of way. The boys are kind of like their puppets.”