The App Generation (15 page)

The majority of Danielle's vids feature scenes from the scifi television series
Stargate Atlantis,
though more recent vids draw from movies. In addition to expressing her imagination, Danielle uses her vids to convey political messages, typically of a feminist bent.

The vidding community that Danielle belongs to on LiveJournal represents an important part of her vidding experience. There, she learns technical skills from more seasoned vidders, receives constructive feedback on the work she shares, and offers her own feedback on others' work. This community isn't limited to the virtual world. Days after her first interview, Danielle flew to Chicago with her best friend to attend a vidding conference where she was excited to meet some of the more “famous” vidders who have mentored her on LiveJournal.

A variety of other social media platforms besides LiveJournal—many of which are available in app form—give youth the opportunity to share their creative work with others. Figment is a “social network for young-adult fiction”—in the words of cofounder Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor of the
New Yorker
—where teens can share their creative writing with other teen authors. Like other social network sites, teens create a profile page that includes a profile picture, a self-description, a list of followers, group memberships (such as “The Poets of Figment” and “Queer Figs”), and a wall for other users to write comments. Given the literary
focus of the site, profile pages also include a list of favorite authors, links to the profile owner's original writings as well as reviews about other writings, and the array of badges that the teen has earned from his or her participation on the site. (A few examples: the “Wordsmith” badge, awarded when a teen has posted ten original pieces; the “Bookworm” badge, awarded when a teen has read twenty-five writings by other teens; and the “Critic” badge, awarded when a teen has written thirty reviews). DeviantART, another site with a similar setup, focuses on visual art instead of creative writing. Sites like these open up exciting possibilities for youth creators to share and receive feedback on their work.

There's much to be excited about in these examples of creative expression in the digital era. Scrolling through the writing and art on sites like Figment and deviantART, it's clear that many young people are using these digital tools to exercise their imaginations. And yet, one wonders what sort of exercise they're getting with these tools. Take Danielle's vids as a case in point. There are certainly those who celebrate vidding and other forms of remixing as original and creative acts of artistic expression.
⁴
Others, however, argue that there's nothing original about reusing work created by others.
⁵
Of course, this argument existed before the arrival of digital media technologies—think of Marcel Duchamp's toilet “fountain” or Andy Warhol's soup cans. The argument is simply brought into sharper relief in this copy-and-paste culture.

There's also a question of whether the constraints built into
apps and other computer software adversely restrict the creative process. Thinking back to our opening example of young children being introduced to a new toy, we raise the question of whether children are better off making up their own games in the backyard or playing video games designed by professional game designers.
⁶
Even when media aren't part of the creative act itself, one wonders how young people's steady diet of text messages, Facebook updates, tweets, and streaming music affects their ability to engage deeply in the creative process and, sooner or later, strike out on their own.

Before we consider how apps and other digital media affect imagination, let's first explore whether young people's imaginative processes have actually changed since the introduction of new media technologies. Imagination is a difficult concept to define, let alone measure. Nonetheless, psychometricians have given it their best effort, typically by administering various tests of creativity. Perhaps the most widely used creativity test is the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Developed in 1966 and currently used worldwide, the TTCT measures several dimensions of creative potential, including intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, verbal expressiveness, and originality. Though not without its critics, the TTCT has been found to predict creative achievement better than other standard measures of creative or divergent thinking.
⁷
Empirical
evidence suggests that high scores on the test successfully predict subsequent creative careers and accomplishments.
⁸

In a widely publicized study, Torrance scores from approximately three hundred thousand children and adults were used to investigate whether the creativity of Americans has changed over the preceding twenty years.
⁹
The research documents a pronounced decline in scores across all areas of the figural test. The largest drop was seen in scores on
elaboration,
which includes the ability to elaborate on ideas and engage in detailed and reflective thinking, as well as the motivation to be creative. Declines were also found in
fluency
(the ability to generate many ideas),
originality
(the ability to produce infrequent, unique, and unusual ideas),
creative strengths
(which include emotional and verbal expressiveness, humorousness, unconventionality, and liveliness and passion), and
resistance to premature closure
(the inclination to remain open-minded, intellectually curious, and open to new experiences). Overall, the declines were steepest in more recent years, from 1998 to 2008, and the scores of young children—from kindergarten through sixth grade—decreased more than those of other age groups.

Curiously, in the same issue of the journal in which this study was published, another group of researchers published an article whose findings paint a more optimistic picture of changes in youth creativity.
¹⁰
The researchers investigated changes in the pretend play ability of children between the ages of six and ten during a twenty-three-year period. Though not synonymous
with creativity, pretend play has been found to predict divergent thinking, which is itself a marker of creativity.
¹¹

The researchers analyzed results from fourteen studies conducted between 1985 and 2008. Each study used the same instrument—the Affect in Play Scale (APS)—to measure the pretend play of children in grades one through three. The APS measures multiple dimensions of pretend play, including
imagination
(How many fantasy elements and novel ideas does the child produce?),
comfort
(How comfortable is the child engaging in play, and how much enjoyment does he or she experience?),
organization
(What is the quality and complexity of the play plot?),
frequency
and
variety of affect
(How often does the child express emotion, and what is the range of emotions expressed?), and
positive
and
negative affect
(How often does the child express positive and negative emotions?).

Of the seven play dimensions measured, only
imagination, comfort,
and
negative affect
showed any significant change over the twenty-three-year period.
Imagination
and
comfort
both increased significantly, suggesting that young children have become more imaginative in their pretend play and have come to derive greater enjoyment from play. In contrast,
negative affect
during play decreased over time. This last change is the only finding that accords with the other study showing declines in creativity, since negative emotional themes in children's play have been linked to divergent thinking.
¹²
At the end of their article, the authors of the play study acknowledge the inconsistency between the main findings of the two studies,
though they offer little in the way of resolution beyond the familiar call for “more research.”

The third set of research findings we'll consider involves our own investigation into changes in youth creativity that may have occurred over the past twenty years. Rather than look at scores on tests of creativity or its correlates (like play), we chose to examine the actual creative productions of young people. This approach provides a more naturalistic view into young people's creative processes. To that end, we conducted an extensive analysis of short stories and visual art created by middle and high school students between 1990 and 2011. (In our methodological appendix we detail how we analyzed these works, including the steps we took to ensure that our classification of each piece was done in a consistent, objective manner.)

It would be appealing if our investigation could decisively resolve the apparent conflict between the two studies discussed above. Unfortunately, such is the nature of research in this minefield-packed area that we're unable to do so. In fact, our findings actually complicate the story further, but in ways that we consider instructive and revealing.

Part of our investigation involved an extensive analysis of 354 pieces of visual art published over a twenty-year period
in
Teen Ink,
a national teen literary and art magazine based in Newton, Massachusetts. Our analysis revealed a notable rise in the complexity of artwork published between 1990 and 2011. For example, we analyzed the background of each piece, evaluating how the artist treats the space around and behind the foreground figures and objects. Compared to the early pieces, the backgrounds in the later pieces are more fully rendered. In other words, figures are more likely to be situated in a fully completed context in the later pieces, whereas the objects of the foreground are more likely to be seen floating in blank or partially rendered spaces in the early pieces.

This difference was large: 78 percent of the later pieces were categorized as fully rendered, compared to only 49 percent of the early pieces. As a consequence, one experiences the later pieces as more fully developed and complete than the early pieces.

Another marker of complexity that we examined pertained to the composition, or balance, of each piece. In particular, we looked at the positioning of the figures and objects in the visual plane: Are they in the center or off to one side? The number of centrally composed pieces dropped from 58 percent of the early pieces to 49 percent of the later pieces, suggesting that the contemporary artists are somewhat more likely to experiment with the location of their figures on the visual plane.

We also looked for evidence of cropping: Do the figures extend beyond the visual plane? Here we found a rise in the number of cropped pieces, from just 4 percent of the early pieces to 15 percent of the later pieces. Again, the contemporary
artists appear to be more comfortable presenting their figures in a less conventional way than the earlier artists.

This departure from convention is also represented by our analysis of the production practices employed by the artist. Not surprisingly, the number of pieces that were manipulated through digital means (Photoshop, postproduction photography manipulation, and so on) increased markedly over the twenty-year period. Less than 1 percent of the early pieces display evidence of digital manipulation; that percentage increased to 10 percent for the later pieces. The later pieces also depart from traditional production practices with respect to the range of media represented. For instance, the number of pieces that employed either traditional pen and ink or another form of drawing (for example, charcoal or pencil) declined from 55 percent of the early pieces to 18 percent of the later pieces. Conversely, the number of pieces using less traditional media—such as digital art, collage, public art, found objects, and mixed media—rose from less than 1 percent of the early pieces to 9 percent of the later pieces.

Our final evidence for the increasing complexity of teen artwork concerns the overall stylistic approach that the artist employed. Examining the pieces holistically in terms of both content and technique, we classified each one as falling into one of three categories:
conservative, neutral,
or
unconventional.
We classified a piece as
conservative
if it followed the traditional conventions of its medium in an appropriate way and didn't deviate from conventional practices in either technique or content. We classified a piece
neutral
if it neither
followed traditional art genres/styles nor offered a unique or provocative take on its subject. If the piece demonstrated obvious provocation in either content or technique, we classified it as
unconventional.
Technically unconventional pieces might play with perspective or use media in unusual ways. Work considered to have unconventional content might depict figures in unlikely contexts—bodies climbing out of trash cans, abstract forms made up of screaming, disembodied heads. Sometimes a piece was considered unconventional in both content and technique, sometimes just one or the other. Our analysis revealed that the percentage of
conservative
pieces declined from 33 percent of the early pieces to 19 percent of the later pieces, whereas the number of
unconventional
pieces rose from 19 percent to 28 percent.

This departure from the expected suggests a growing sophistication in the art produced by young artists over the twenty-year period of our investigation.

Our analysis of teens' creative writing—both among middle school students and high school students—produced a notably different pattern of changes. For instance, when evaluating the types of genre employed by the high school writers (for example, science fiction, fairy tale, or historical fiction), we found evidence of a decline in what we call “genre play.” A story was deemed to display genre play when it deviated from a traditional realist perspective, typically by incorporating fantasy elements such as magic or absurdist themes. Among the stories written in the early 1990s, 64 percent incorporate such fantasy elements. By contrast, nearly three-quarters of the
later stories (72 percent) evidence no sign of genre play at all (for sample stories from each time period, see
pages 136
–
139
).