The App Generation (10 page)

The themes of growing anxiety and aversion to risk surfaced in other focus groups. One therapist reflected that youth seem reluctant to engage in certain endeavors for fear of feeling anxious or depressed if they don't go as planned. Indeed, many participants agreed that young people's identities are defined by insecurity and disequilibrium. The religious leaders remarked that youth today are generally more fearful about their future. “Even the most confident Harvard grad . . . ,” shared one participant, “is . . . scared to death.” The therapists observed that, to cope with this fear, many young persons display a notable lack of affect and an apparent goal to “feel nothing.” Citing a word all too familiar to parents of today's teenagers, one participant called today's youth the “‘whatever' generation.”

This anxiety and desire to “feel nothing” may explain why alcohol abuse, including binge-drinking and driving while intoxicated, has increased dramatically among college students in recent years.
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It is not uncommon for students at selective colleges to drink steadily from Thursday through Sunday evenings. Possibly reflecting analogous pressures, the educators who work in low-income neighborhoods have observed a growing sense of hopelessness among youth stemming from the increased violence in their neighborhoods and a dramatic
decrease in job and advancement opportunities. One educator reflected, “Kids used to get into a fight and a kid might get a nose broken. The difference today is, a kid might shoot a kid and they're dead.” Other participants agreed that being surrounded by such violence leads at least some of these youth to take greater risks, believing they have nothing to lose since they're unlikely to make it past their teen years.

The anxieties of today's youth are reflected in large-scale data tracking young people's lifestyle choices. According to a 2012
New York Times
op-ed, compared to their counterparts from the 1980s, today's young adults are considerably less likely to move to another state.
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Members of this age cohort were also twice as likely to live at home in 2008 compared to 1980.
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Today's youth even appear to be reluctant to leave the house for a drive. Fully 80 percent of eighteen-year-olds held a driver's license in the early 1980s. By 2010, less than two-thirds (61 percent) of eighteen-year-olds had earned their driver's license.
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As these trends suggest, there's a large, apparently nondigital component to youth's growing anxieties. Several participants reflected on the challenging economic landscape that today's young people face. Indeed, researchers have documented that youth who grow up during a recession are less likely to leave home, take risks with their investments, or start their own company. Young people caught in such circumstances
are also more likely to believe that luck, rather than individual effort, plays the biggest role in a person's success.
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Our participants also identified the increased focus in education on standardized testing and accountability as a major cause of young people's growing passivity and aversion to risk-taking. Federal initiatives in the United States such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top tie government funding to students' test scores, making it necessary for schools to structure the school day around efforts to improve their students' test performance. (The educational testing industry is not unaffected by the app atmosphere of ranking, counting, and prepackaged curricula—we regard this as a vicious rather than a virtuous circle, a triumph of behaviorist approaches over constructivist ones.) This environment discourages risk-taking by placing top priority on filling in the correct answer on a multiple choice test. It's also likely to breed anxiety when students' failure to pass the test may not only diminish their chances for admission to college but also get a teacher fired or even a school closed.

Our focus group participants didn't let parents off the hook, either. They observed that today's parents demonstrate a passionate desire to shield their children from experiencing any sort of unhappiness or hardship. The therapists we interviewed observed that this emphasis on happiness seems to leave young people unable to cope with the emotional complexity of life. One psychiatrist put it this way: he is “an advocate[, not] of unhappiness, but [of] the ability to tolerate unhappiness.”
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In lower-income families, the desire to shield one's children often takes the form of parents working hard so that their children don't have to. One educator reported that on the day after a major snowstorm, she asked her students to raise their hands if they had shoveled their families' driveways and sidewalks; none raised their hands. She said that according to her students, they spent the day indoors while their parents shoveled snow. In wealthier families (where snow-clearing is outsourced to a local vendor), the desire to shield one's children from disappointment often takes the form of parents micromanaging their children's lives so that they might avoid mistakes and failure. Our participants worried that, through these well-intentioned actions, parents are unwittingly promoting passivity among their children and preventing them from developing a secure sense of autonomy and from taking unsanctioned but reasonable risks.

Although changes in the economy, education, and parenting are no doubt important contributors to youth's aversion to risk-taking, it's instructive to consider the role that our digital media environment may play. Not just in the United States—indeed, in fifteen countries!—researchers found that the proportion of youth who are online is inversely related to the proportion of youth with a driver's license.
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As with the research connecting narcissism and Internet use, this study can't say whether time online causes or is the result of a postponed
driver's license. We note, though, that if you spend lots of time poring over Facebook, there's less time—and perhaps less need—to take to the road.

Facebook may keep young people from taking risks outside the house, but what about risk-taking online? Since children started using the Internet in large numbers, there's been considerable attention paid to the harm that might befall them at the hands of online predators. As it turns out, young people are far more likely to be harmed by someone they know offline than an online stranger.
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Still, many adults interpret youth's online sharing of personal information and interactions with strangers as risk-taking behavior.

Young people are more careful about their online actions than some adults might think. Considerable empirical evidence indicates that youth are both aware of and care about privacy risks online. A 2010 survey of thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds living in the United States found that 88 percent of teens said they worry about the consequences of posting their contact information online.
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In our interviews with middle school students, we found that participants' privacy concerns led them to employ a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online, such as using the privacy controls on social networking sites and choosing to omit personal information like their home address and telephone number.
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In fact, other researchers have found evidence that young people's privacy-protecting behaviors on social networking sites have increased over time such that they are more likely than older adults to engage in these cautionary behaviors.
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There's an interesting paradox here. Using privacy controls may give youth the (misleading) impression that it's safe to reveal what lies beneath the external polish they present to adults offline. For example, there's evidence that the rise of excessive alcohol consumption among young people is reflected—and touted—online. In one study, researchers found that over half of the college students in their sample selected an alcohol-related image for their Facebook profile. Overall, the results suggest that many college-age youth find it desirable to express an alcohol-related identity on Facebook.
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Snapchat—the app that lets you send self-destructing images to others—represents another example of the false sense of security that youth may feel when interacting with their peers online. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many teens are using Snapchat to send revealing pictures and video clips of themselves.
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But even Katie and Howard—who are far from being tech wizards—immediately imagined a scenario where the recipient of a sext might use a second device, be it a camera, phone, or tablet, to take a picture of an image sent via Snapchat, rendering it decidedly more permanent than the sender intended. As it turns out, people are already doing this. In early 2013, two teenage girls in New Jersey used Snapchat to send nude photos of themselves to a male classmate, who promptly took screenshots of the photos and posted them on (the very public) photo-sharing site Instagram.
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Snapchat and sexting aside, apps and the app mentality in many ways support and reinforce youth's general shift toward risk aversion. There exist a host of apps to remove many
of the risks that have represented until now a standard part of daily experience. Messaging apps remove risks associated with interpersonal communication by doing away with the discomfort one might feel when confronting someone face to face. Information apps take away the risk of giving an incorrect answer, whereas location apps eliminate the risk of getting lost in an unfamiliar place. It strikes Katie and Howard as a remarkable fact that Molly has never had the experience of being lost. Each of us can recall instances from our youth when we didn't know where we were and didn't have immediate access to a parent to guide us to familiar territory. Though scary, these experiences stand out in our memories because they tested our resiliency and gave us a sense of autonomy. Such experiences are foreign to Molly. With her map app and ability to call her parents at any time, she can always be sure of where she is and how to get to her next location . . . unless she loses her cell phone!

Let's return for a moment to our participants' observation that today's parents increasingly desire to protect their children from any stress or failure. It's easy enough to see how technology feeds into this desire. Participants said that it's not uncommon for today's college students to text or call their parents multiple times a day. One participant observed, “Students at college are not on their own anymore, with parents seeing their grades and maybe their bank overdrafts. . . . I guess the term for it is ‘helicopter parents.'”

As mentioned in our opening discussion, we heard similar concerns from the camp directors we interviewed. Camp
has traditionally been seen as an early step toward autonomy, when children first leave home for an extended period. This step is becoming harder for youth to take in today's media-saturated world that allows parents and children to stay connected even when they're physically separated. It's worth recalling the testimony of the camp director who told us that it's all too common for parents to send their children to camp with two cell phones—one to surrender publicly in apparent compliance with the camp's no-tech policy, and one to reserve for surreptitious texts and calls home. As this anecdote suggests, technology only facilitates this constant connection; it doesn't instigate it.

Other researchers have found similar evidence for technology's facilitating role in maintaining high levels of contact between youth and their parents.
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A series of studies involving undergraduates, recent graduates, and parents revealed that college students were in contact with their parents an average of 13.4 times per week.
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Exchanges involved parents providing direction on classwork, as well as a “best friend” phenomenon in which children shared their daily goings-on and moment-to-moment feelings with their parents (usually their mothers). Howard cannot conceive of an analogous situation fifty years ago.

Turkle uses the metaphor of a tether to suggest that youth's constant connections to their digital devices and the people accessible through them weaken their ability to develop an autonomous sense of self. These technologies encourage youth to look outside themselves for reassurance, in matters both
mundane and existential. Indeed, their thoughts and feelings don't seem real until confirmed by others. This argument is supported by empirical evidence showing that college students who use their digital devices to maintain frequent contact with their parents tend to be less autonomous.
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In the spirit of Turkle, some scholars have invoked the concept of
psychasthenia
in an effort to explain how people's online presence can weaken their sense of self to the point of full renunciation.
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Our participants observed and celebrated the fact that today's youth enjoy greater freedom to adopt and rejoice in identities that were either unknown or scorned in decades past. They've become more accepting of those who are different from themselves. These youth are less likely to alienate their peers who vary from the social norm—the “geeky” kids—and they're more accepting of non-heterosexual peers. Racial conflict, while certainly still persistent in some contexts, has largely diminished. One teacher noted that the occurrence of interracial prom dates is now so common at her school as to be unremarkable. This state of affairs contrasts starkly with her early career, when interracial dating was practically unheard of and she was mandated by the school to take attendance based on race! These observations align with Arthur Levine and Diane Dean's research in colleges across the United States;
they find that today's students display greater comfort with racial, ethnic, and diverse gender roles. Similarly, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles find that fully 75 percent of first-year college students surveyed in 2012 said they support same-sex marriage, an extraordinary rise from 51 percent in 1997, when the question was first asked.
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