The App Generation (14 page)

Our focus group participants also implicated today's suite of reality television shows in the degradation of young people's interpersonal relationships. Shows like
Jersey Shore, Bad Girls Club,
and the
Real Housewives
series feature “real-life” characters who consistently act contemptibly toward one another. In each season of
Bad Girls Club,
for instance, seven self-described “bad girls” are put together in a mansion and then filmed as they proceed—predictably—to behave badly. The camera follows them around the house, pool, and limo as they push, slap, and scream at each other and generally do everything they can to elevate their own status in the house at the expense of their housemates. This type of behavior
evokes images from tabloid talk shows dating back to the early 1990s, like
The Jerry Springer Show
(which, by the way, was still airing new episodes as of the writing of this book). However, the increase in the number of such shows and the ease with which they can be accessed—via the Hulu, YouTube, or Netflix apps—seems to have expanded their imprint on the cultural psyche.

The crazy-quilt nature of online communications among youth was brought home sharply to Howard when he eavesdropped (with permission) on a scheduled conversation about digital life among a dozen teenagers. For the first few minutes of the discussion, the young people talked about social network communications in a mild and benign way. But then one young man mentioned how reputations can be destroyed. This simple remark opened up a floodgate of testimony, with several students detailing ways in which classmates and friends had been lambasted and bullied, often with no defense from their supposed friends. It was as if a curtain had been lifted, revealing the backstage events on Facebook. As another instance of the schizoid quality of online communications, several young people in our studies reported the strange situation in which a person reveals the most intimate details online, subsequently reverting to perfunctory, distanced interactions offline with the very peers to whom the messages had previously been directed.

Though illuminating, Molly's experiences and the observations of our focus group participants are more suggestive than proof positive that today's media landscape adversely affects
social relations. As with most social science research, it's not easy to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two complex variables. However, we did come across one study that moved in this direction. The researchers designed a series of clever experiments to test whether cell phone use affects college students' prosocial tendencies.
³⁵
In one experiment, participants completed a questionnaire that measured their willingness and motivation to engage in a variety of prosocial acts. Half of the participants were asked to use their cell phones for a brief time before filling out the questionnaire. These participants were less likely than participants in the control group to say that they would volunteer for a community service activity. They were also less likely to persist in solving word problems that they were told would result in a monetary donation to a charity. Remarkably, these differences remained even when the participants in the treatment group were asked to draw a picture of their cell phone and then think about how they use it.

To explain their findings, the study's authors suggest that the cell phone enhances participants' feelings of social connectedness, thereby decreasing their need to seek social connection elsewhere. The implications of this influence are profound. Think about who you communicate with most via cell phone—more likely than not, close family and friends dominate the list. It may be that our cell phone use diminishes our inclination to seek social connection beyond our close circle of intimates.

A similar dynamic may be playing out on the Internet. In
The Filter Bubble,
Eli Pariser explains how search engines and
social network sites show us only what we want to see (or what they think we want to see).
³⁶
He uses Facebook's EdgeRank as one example of how this works. EdgeRank uses an algorithm to rank users' friends list according to how much interaction each user has with each person on the list. EdgeRank then uses that ranking to structure users' newsfeeds so they see more from the friends at the top of the list. Google's search algorithm works in a similar way such that two people conducting an identical Google search (whether it's “performing arts in Atlanta” or “2012 presidential election”) will be shown a different set of results based on what Google knows about them (and drawing on previous search history, Gmail contacts and exchanges, YouTube posts and viewing habits—Google knows a lot!). Pariser argues that such algorithms have a siloing effect, causing us to encounter only like-minded people and ideas online. It's difficult to empathize with perspectives that we never see.
³⁷

Apps are, ultimately, shortcuts. We've seen in this chapter a number of shortcuts in how today's young people carry out their interpersonal relationships. These shortcuts make interacting with others much quicker, easier, and less risky. If used in moderation and to augment rather than replace face-to-face contact, such conveniences can certainly enable meaningful relations and, at their best, strengthen and deepen personal bonds.

However, convenience comes at a cost. We've considered the extent to which particular features of mediated communication may underpin the increasing isolation and declining empathy identified by a range of scholars. In light of our discussion in the previous chapter, we're particularly attuned to the role of diminished risk-taking in these societal trends. It may feel more comfortable to remove the risk from social interactions, but if we don't put ourselves out there, we can't truly connect with others (isolation). And, if we don't truly connect with others, we can't put ourselves in their shoes (empathy).

Combining the two areas we've surveyed so far produces a picture of the prevalent consciousness of members of the App Generation. When it comes to a sense of identity, many members of this generation feel pressure to proceed down a path that is valorized by society (other-dependent) and that promises them the life and career they feel they deserve (app-dependent). When it comes to a sense of intimacy, such young people make ready and skilled use of modes of connection that are instantly available but with the concomitant failure to pursue riskier, yet potentially more meaningful relationships with one another. Only those young people able to resist the Narcissus trap and the Circean lure of the apps-of-the-moment are likely to form a meaningful identity or to forge intimate relationships with others. Having surveyed young people's sense of self and their relation to others, we turn next to the kinds of imaginative worlds that they create and how these may be shaped by the digital tools at their disposal.

A
PPS LIKE
S
KETCH
B
OOK
, B
RUSHES,
ArtStudio, Procreate, and ArtRage allow artists to draw, sketch, and paint using their smartphone or tablet. Photographers can create and manipulate images with Flixel, Instagram, Fotor, and PhotoSlice. For aspiring filmmakers, there's Viddy, iMovie, Video Star, and Movie360. Musicians can compose and arrange their music using SoundBrush, GarageBand, Songwriter's Pad, and Master Piano.

We could make similar lists for just about any artistic genre. A sizable portion of the app ecology is devoted to supporting artistic production. Even apps that aren't ostensibly meant for creative pursuits lend themselves to imaginative uses. Recall our earlier discussion of the mini-performances that Molly stages and sends to Katie via the messaging app Snapchat. Living up to the name that we have bestowed on them, apps have changed how members of the App Generation engage their imaginations. We'll explore what's gained and what's
lost by using apps (and other digital media) for the purpose of artistic expression.

We find that digital media open up new avenues for youth to express themselves creatively. Remix, collage, video production, and music composition—to name just a few popular artistic genres of the day—are easier and cheaper for today's youth to pursue than were their predigital counterparts. It's also easier to find an audience for one's creative productions. The app metaphor serves us well here, since apps are easy to use, support diverse artistic genres, and encourage sharing among their users.

And yet—reflecting patterns we observed in youth's expressions of personal identity and experiences of intimacy—an app mentality can lead to an unwillingness to stretch beyond the functionality of the software and the packaged sources of inspiration that come with a Google search. We ask: Under what circumstances do apps enable imaginative expression? Under what circumstances do they foster a dependent or narrow-minded approach to creation?

Before proceeding, two background points. First, a word about our focus on art. We recognize that the imagination can be exercised in just about any sphere, be it science, business, a hobby, or sports. Indeed, Erik Erikson was referring to a wide range of endeavors when he wrote about the challenge of using one's mind and one's resources actively and imaginatively to pursue a meaningful, generative life. We focus on art because it may have the broadest provenance, because it's generally what people think of first when they think of imagination,
and because we have had the opportunity to examine wonderfully revealing collections of art secured over a two-decade span.

Second, a word about the term
imagination
. We are interested in how young persons use their cognitive, social, and emotional capacities to broaden their understandings and enrich their productions—to think outside the box, as the saying goes. Many commentators are interested in this twenty-first-century skill, and they readily invoke words like “creativity,” “innovation,” “originality,” and “entrepreneurship” to capture the idea. We like “imagination” because it focuses sharply on the psychological process that the young person can bring to an activity—and, to be candid, because it allows us to speak of the Three Is.

There can be little doubt that apps and other digital media technologies have altered the landscape of imaginative expression. They've affected virtually every facet of the creative process, encompassing who can be a creator, what can be created, and how creations come into being and find an audience.

Let's consider a few examples. If you've watched the Super Bowl (or, more important, the commercials) at some point over the past several years, you've likely seen one or more of the consumer-generated ads for Doritos. PepsiCo Frito-Lay, the company that sells Doritos, initiated the “Crash the Super
Bowl” advertising campaign in 2007 by inviting fans to design their own thirty-second ads for Doritos and to vote online for their favorite finalists. After submitting their projects, many of the amateur filmmakers used social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook to build support for their commercials.

For the 2012 Super Bowl, submissions topped 6,100 (the highest ever) and online voting reached into the hundreds of thousands. One of the competition winners—featuring a baby and grandmother duo who team up to snatch a bag of Doritos from a playground bully—scored the no. 1 spot on the USA Today/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. The Ad Meter itself marked the first time that USA Today partnered with Facebook to allow viewers—rather than preselected, “authorized” panelists—to choose their favorite Super Bowl commercial. The Ad Meter win earned the ad's creator, a former special education teacher, a bonus prize of one million dollars from PepsiCo.

To be sure, the “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign is partly a story about how corporations are finding ways to use social media to grow their profits. But it also illustrates how today's digital media technologies are shaping the creative process in new ways. The introduction of inexpensive and flexible video-taking hardware (smartphones, digital cameras, tablets) and video-editing software (many of them available as apps like iMovie, Viddy, and Movie360) has both lowered the bar for entry into filmmaking and elevated the quality of amateur productions. The advent of social media is also transformative.
¹
Scholars talk about the important role that “the
field”—essentially, those who judge any given work—plays in the creative process.
²
Video-sharing sites and apps like YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook have dramatically expanded the size of this field, as well as the amateur videographer's access to it.
³

Molly is one such amateur videographer who's taking advantage of the creative opportunities introduced by digital media technologies. She started making videos at age eleven with the iMovie software that came standard with her first laptop, a MacBook. She found the software intuitive and enjoyed tinkering with the various effects, title sequences, and music overlays. Her movies have typically involved clips of time spent with friends and family, artfully pieced together and set to evocative music. She's even posted a few on YouTube. “While they get nowhere near the millions of views that a Justin Bieber video gets, it's nice to think my teeny videos have been watched by other people.”

We've interviewed several other young creators during our research and found them to be using digital tools in a variety of imaginative ways. Nineteen-year-old Danielle told Katie about her experiences creating and sharing vids on the online journaling community LiveJournal. The young videographer described vids as short videos consisting of clips from a television show or movie and set to popular music. As such, they belong to the same family as musical mashups, made popular by the TV show
Glee.
Typically, there's a strong fan community surrounding the chosen television show or movie. Viewers are expected to draw on their background knowledge of
the original work to interpret the message conveyed by the vidder's scene and music selections.