The App Generation (2 page)

Howard was surprised by this practice, noting that we typically think of girls in high school and college as being on the lookout for older men. “When I went to school, the junior and senior girls were all trying to go out with college guys.”

Molly patiently explained that it's not about a real desire to date freshmen boys—after all, the girls are already dating senior boys. It's more of an initiation and reinforcement of social status. The freshmen boys are accepted into the social life of the sports team by way of the girls, who themselves use their “Facebook marriages” as further confirmation of their connection to the senior boys.

Why open with this anecdote? Because, in addition to representing an intriguing example of youth culture in a digital era, it touches on all three of the central themes in this book. With respect to personal
identity,
the Facebook marriage between
freshman boy and senior girl is an act of public performance that forms part of a teen's carefully crafted online persona. Given its orientation toward an online audience, this external persona may have little connection to the teen's internal sense of self, with its associated values, beliefs, feelings, and aspirations. Yet paradoxically, if inadvertently, this electronic betrothal may contribute to an emerging sense of identity.

Issues of
intimacy
arise when we consider the new forms of social connection and interaction that have emerged with the rise of digital media. (It's hard to come up with an analog version of the Facebook marriage.) Though we identified positive aspects to these online connections in our research, the depth and authenticity of the relationships they support are sometimes questionable. Molly observed: “You never see [the senior girls and freshmen boys] hanging out as if they're good friends, like I can't see them going to each other with a problem or anything like that. But they're really good at putting on this kind of persona on Facebook of ‘Everything is great and we're all friends and nothing is wrong here.'” Consider, too, that Molly, who rarely comes in contact with these teens in person, is nevertheless connected to them on Facebook.

Our final theme is
imagination,
and there's no doubt that the Facebook marriage represents an imaginative expression, if not leap. In our conversation Howard observed: “It's a bit like in mythology, the older queen picking the younger lad who has to perform for her.” Of particular note is the fact that this specific act of expression is dependent on—indeed, probably inspired by—the relationship status options available on
Facebook (“married,” “single,” “in a relationship,” “it's complicated”). In this way, the Facebook marriage illustrates how digital media give rise to new forms of imaginative expression, just as the format of this application shapes and restricts these expressions in distinct and distinctive ways.

So much for our conversation and the themes and insights contained therein. We believe that one can find similar trends and manifestations across other areas that we might have surveyed—say, how one thinks about education or childrearing, religion or politics, work or play, personal morality or ethics at the workplace. (We consider some of these spheres at the end of the book.) The digital media leave few areas untouched—and their influences going forward promise to be equally dramatic and equally difficult to anticipate.

Yet we've become convinced that a single characterization best captures what is special about the changes digital media have wrought to this point. We capture this insight with the epithet the “App Generation.” An “app” or “application” is a software program, often designed to run on a mobile device, that allows the user to carry out one or more operations. As captured in the photograph here, apps can be narrow or broad, simple or grand, and in either case are tightly controlled by the individual or organization that designed the app. Apps can access tunes or the
New York Times,
enable games or prayers, answer questions or raise new ones. Crucially, they are fast, on demand, just in time. You might think of them as shortcuts: they take you straight to what you're looking for, no need to perform a web search or, if determinedly old-fashioned, a search through your own memory.

It's our argument that young people growing up in our time are not only immersed in apps: they've come to think of the world as an ensemble of apps, to see their lives as a string of ordered apps, or perhaps, in many cases, a single, extended, cradle-to-grave app. (We've labeled this overarching app a
“super-app.”) Whatever human beings might want should be provided by apps; if the desired app doesn't yet exist, it should be devised right away by someone (perhaps the seeker); and if no app can be imagined or devised, then the desire (or fear or conundrum) simply does not (or at least should not) matter.

Let's consider a familiar task of life and how an ensemble of apps has increasingly taken over how we accomplish it: finding your way from point A to point B. A century ago, if one wished to make one's way from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Boston's North End, one had a few options. One could ask a friend or passerby for written or oral directions, rely on one's memory of a previous journey, or look at a map of the greater Boston area and plan one's path by foot or some other mode of transportation. At the extremes, there were other choices: one could embark on a random walk (risking the possibility of never getting there). Or, like the proverbial Charlie from the Kingston Trio's famous song who got stuck on the Boston subway system and “never returned,” one could take the MBTA. Or one could ask an organization (in later years, the American Automobile Association) for a TripTik—a fool-proof, block-by-block itinerary.

While some readers will remember these times, to contemporary consciousness they seem hopelessly old-fashioned. In recent years, many of us have in our hands or in our vehicles a device that informs us of our precise position in space, directs us from that position to our desired location, and, if for any reason we deviate from the preferred route, adjusts its directions accordingly. For all practical purposes, such GPS systems
are apps that remove uncertainty from our journey. Indeed, you might decide to use your smartphone as a navigation system by calling up Google Maps. Such apps not only give us extremely detailed maps of locations; drawing on our known and inferred preferences and the reviews of other users, they inform us about options every step of the way, such as nearby restaurants, cafés, or points of interest. We can say that these apps allow error-free navigation even as they seek to satisfy all of our possible needs and desires en route.

With respect to a life with foolproof navigational aids, after Howard delivered a talk on education to a college audience, a bright and somewhat aggressive student brandishing his smartphone approached Howard. Flashing a grin, he said, “In the future, why will we need school? After all, the answers to all questions are—or soon will be—contained in this smartphone.” Howard reflected for a moment and then responded, “Yes, the answers to all questions . . . except the important ones.” A world permeated by apps can in many ways be a wondrous one; and yet, we must ask whether all of life is—or should be—simply a collection of apps or one great, overarching super-app.

Apps are great if they take care of ordinary stuff and thereby free us to explore new paths, form deeper relationships, ponder the biggest mysteries of life, forge a unique and meaningful identity. But if apps merely turn us into more skilled couch potatoes who do not think for ourselves, or pose new questions, or develop significant relationships, or fashion an appropriate, rounded, and continually evolving sense of self,
then the apps simply line the road to serfdom, psychologically speaking. One can get from Harvard Square to the North End with one's eyes wide open or one's eyes shut tight. In what follows, we attempt to capture this contrast neologistically: apps that allow or encourage us to pursue new possibilities are
app-enabling.
In contrast, when we allow apps to restrict or determine our procedures, choices, and goals, we become
app-dependent.

In informal terms, we've introduced the problematic of this book and hinted at the answers we detail in the pages that follow. But we are hardly the first to have attempted a description of the current generation of young persons, nor are we alone in seeking to link the profile of today's youth to the influence of digital media. Indeed, hardly a day goes by without some pundit singing the praises or lamenting the costs of a life dominated by digital devices. And hardly a fortnight goes by without a major essay or book on the topic. Before plunging into the details of our study, we owe the reader an explanation of what is special about our endeavor and the book it has spawned.

Although some of the current thinking and writing about digital youth is notable, the ratio of claims made to data gathered and analyzed systematically is embarrassingly, indeed unacceptably, high. We have attempted to redress this imbalance. Over the past five years, our research team at Harvard has carried out a number of convergent studies on the nature of today's youth. Using a variety of methods, we have sought to
understand to what extent, and in which ways, the youth of today may differ from their predecessors.

To begin with, we've observed young people, talked with them, eavesdropped (with permission!) on conversations dedicated to bland topics like “today's youth” or stimulated by more provocative conversation-openers like “What do we owe to our parents and for what should we blame them?” Some of these conversations have been recorded, others reconstructed based on notes we've taken.

In formal work, guided by protocols, we've conducted systematic interviews with approximately 150 young people living in the New England area and a smaller sample in Bermuda. The New England interviews were conducted between 2008 and 2010 as part of a project examining the ethical dimensions of young people's digital media activities. For this project, we spoke with youth spanning middle schoolers up to recent college graduates about their experiences with digital media, including any “thorny” situations they'd encountered online. We also interviewed twenty girls who had been blogging throughout their middle and high school years in an online journaling community called LiveJournal. The remaining youth interviews were conducted in Bermuda with students ranging from the eighth through twelfth grades. In our interviews, we have secured much information about how young people think of digital media, how they make use of them, and what they see as the advantages and the limitations of the panoply of devices at their fingertips.

To supplement our studies with young people, we have carried out an ambitious, complementary program of research with knowledgeable adults. We constituted seven focus groups, each composed of six to ten adults who had worked with young people over at least a twenty-year period—spanning the predigital to the hyperdigital era. Each focus group assembled adults who had a particular form of contact with young people. Specifically, there were focus groups composed of psychoanalysts; psychologists and other mental health workers; camp directors and longtime counselors; religious leaders; arts educators; and classroom teachers and after-school educators who worked primarily with youth living in low-income neighborhoods. In addition, we carried out forty interviews, many extending over two hours, with high school teachers who had worked with young people over at least two decades. Each focus group and interview was recorded, documented, and analyzed.

Last, in what we believe is a unique line of research, we have compared the artistic productions of young people gathered over a twenty-year period using depositories of student work that had been accumulated continuously throughout the two decades. We chose to look at two bodies of work—student writing and student graphic productions—and discern how the work changed over this period. Our findings, detailed in our discussion of the imaginative powers of young people, revealed the importance of the particular medium of expression chosen by the young artists.

So much for our methods: technical details are provided in
the appendix. Another downside of most current discussions of young people is that they are lamentably anachronistic—that is, they lack careful attention to the various contexts within which a discussion of today's young people needs to be considered.

Accordingly, in the next chapters, we provide two disciplinary contexts within which to locate the young people of today. The first context is
technological.
If we are to claim that the youth of today are defined by the technologies they favor, we need to consider how, in earlier times, technologies—ranging from hand tools to telephones—may have affected or even defined human beings, human nature, and human consciousness. This discussion invites us to distinguish among tools, machines, and the information-rich media of the past century and to consider how digital media may represent a quantum leap in power and influence.