The App Generation (3 page)

The second context is deliberately interdisciplinary. We ask, “What do we mean when we speak of a generation?” For most of human history, generations have been defined biologically—the time from an individual's birth to when that individual becomes (or could become) a parent. In recent centuries, generations have been increasingly defined by sociological considerations. The defining characteristics of a generation echo the dominant events of the time, be they military (the Great War), political (the assassination of a leader), economic (the Great Depression), or cultural (the Lost Generation of the 1920s, the Beat Generation of the 1950s). We propose that, going forward, generations may be defined by their dominant
technologies, with the length of the generation dependent on the longevity of a particular technological innovation.

Throughout our discussion, we keep our eyes on how young people have acted—as well as how they have been characterized and defined by their elders. At the same time, we maintain a sharp focus on the events of the past half century—specifically, the events that defined the spaces in which Howard, Katie, and Molly have each grown up and have helped to fashion the identity, intimacy, and imagination of the three of us, and of our peer groups. As it happens, two books published in 1950—
The Lonely Crowd,
by the sociologist David Riesman and his colleagues, and
Childhood and Society,
by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson—provide apt contexts for this transgenerational comparison.

In such a wide-ranging undertaking, with both empirical variety and disciplinary reach, we (as well as our readers) welcome a viable and dependable throughline. This throughline is provided by our characterization of today's young people as the App Generation. Whether we are unpacking the technological or generational contexts, or reviewing our various empirical studies, we focus on how the availability, proliferation, and power of apps mark the young persons of our time as different and special—indeed, how their consciousness is formed by immersion in a sea of apps. Fittingly, in the concluding chapter, we consider the effect of an “app milieu” on a range of human activities and aspirations. More grandly, we ponder the questions, “What might life in an ‘app world' signal for the future of the species and the planet?”

T
HE FIRST TECHNOLOGIES ARE
built into our species' hardware and software. Stroke the side of a newborn's foot and the toes will spread; make a sudden loud sound and the infant will startle; smile at a three-month-old and the baby will smile back. No instruction is necessary.

Externally invented technologies have been with us for many thousands of years, and they are equally a part of human development. One can tickle with a brush as well as with the hand; the loud sound can come from a percussion instrument or a foghorn; and the infant can smile at a doll or a mobile. Nor need the young child be a passive reactor. Within the first year or so of life, the child can shake a rattle, search for a hidden phone, even drag a computer mouse and behold an object skipping across a screen . . . or, in the manner of the only slightly fanciful cartoon reproduced here, transfer funds from one account to another.

Whether part of each of our bodies, or devised by human hands over the years, technologies provide a principal means by which we carry out actions from the time of birth to the time of death—or at least until senescence appears. Many of our greatest human achievements are due to technologies devised by humans—think of clocks, the spinning wheel, the steam engine, rocket ships. Many of our most frightening achievements are also due to technologies devised by human beings—think of bows and arrows, rifles, nuclear weapons, rocket ships (again), or, most recently, the drones with which battles in remote sites are increasingly being waged.

Michael Maslin / The New Yorker Collection.

In our focus on apps, we are examining a preeminent technology of our time. But in discussing apps and “The App Generation,” we will inevitably touch on four different perspectives or spheres, each with its own terminology and vocabulary. These perspectives are often confused or conflated in writing—and, indeed, in
thinking
about the components and forces that characterize our fast-changing era. As much as possible, with the aim of avoiding both preciosity and pedantry, we will try to make clear on which perspective we are focusing.

• Tools and machines:
technology
in the traditional sense (ax, steam engine), typically built out of wood, metal, plastic, or other available materials;

•
Information
that can be transmitted via our own bodies or by manmade technologies of various sorts (news, entertainment, maps, encyclopedia entries);

• Information transmitted by a particular machine or tool (the television set that conveys local or international news constitutes a medium of communication; so, too, the geographical information presented on a Google or Yahoo! map)—in referring to these instances, we will use the terms
medium
and its plural,
media;
and

•
Human psychology
(sensing, attending, categorizing, deciding, acting, other processes of the mind).

So, to be concrete, suppose we are dealing with options that allow a user to find out about different restaurants in a neighborhood, such as the North End of Boston.

•
Technology
is the particular smartphone or hardware that is accessed by the user, in this case, a teenager who wants to meet a group of friends for a meal;

•
Information
is the particular set of categories of food and location that can be captured in many ways;

•
Medium
is how this information can be presented in a particular app; at the time that this book went to press, Yelp and Google Maps would be popular choices, but essentially the same information could also be written down, presented in a map, or be part of another app, say one devoted to Healthy Foods; and

•
Human psychology
entails the use of hands, eyes, ears; the attention span needed to assimilate and process the information; the decision made about where to go, with whom, and for what purposes; and reflections on “how it went.”

It's not uncommon to speak of technologies as changing human nature—or at least human thought and action (what we've just labeled “human psychology”)—in fundamental ways. Books have been written about the changes wrought by clocks, steam engines, nuclear weapons—indeed, famously, by “guns, germs, and steel.” For the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford, the technologies of the twentieth century have increasingly come to control the options available to us, making us more and more like cogs that allow our machinery to operate as it has been designed (initially, by human beings) to operate.
¹
We create factory machines to automate work, and they end up converting us into automata—reminiscent of the hurried and harried assembly-line worker in Charlie Chaplin's
Modern Times.

Charlie Chaplin,
Modern Times
(1936). Film still © Roy Export S.A.S. Scan Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna.

Jacques Ellul, a French contemporary of Mumford's, puts forth a far more chilling portrait.
²
He recognizes the importance throughout history of tools—usually handheld creations that allow individual farmers or craftsmen to accomplish daily tasks with greater efficiency. He distinguishes such tools from machines—more elaborate devices that operate primarily
on their own (beyond hand-holding) and make possible mass production by assembly-line workers. But in Ellul's view, it is naive to think of machines and tools as merely coming to dominate our lives. As he sees it, such technological artifacts usher in a fundamental change in human psychology: a way of thinking in which every aspect of our lives has to be rationalized as much as possible, measured to the nth degree, rank ordered in terms of ever greater efficiency (or some other readily quantified dimension like speed or number of “hits”). Whatever contributes to these trends must be pursued; anything that gets in the way will—indeed,
has to be
—scuttled. We end up with a species that is well embarked on a single, unidirectional, unwavering march toward a totally technological milieu.

While Mumford might see apps as sapping individual agency, Ellul would see them as symptoms of an all-encompassing weltanschauung, or worldview. Human beings only too willingly accept the premises of technology—that efficiency, automaticity, impersonality can and should trump individual goals, will, faith. Put succinctly, technology re-creates human psychology.

Our interest here is centered on specific technologies (mechanical devices) that enable communication of information (hence, in our term, on particular media). Few doubt that the invention of writing, in the millennia before the birth of Christ, brought about fundamental change in human thought and expression. Socrates thought that writing would vitiate human memory, but in fact it enabled philosophical and scientific
thought. There is similar consensus that the invention of the printing press 650 years ago was epochal. Gutenberg's machine undermined religious authoritarianism even as it laid the groundwork for mass education.

In the last century, in developed or developing countries, the technologies of the body, the tool chest, the factory, the weapons arsenal have been rapidly expanded and often supplanted by powerful
media of communication.
First the telegraph, then the telephone, then radio and television are objects to be touched and manipulated, entities from which to receive messages and, in the case of the telegraph (at least for those fluent in Morse or some other code) and the telephone (for anyone willing to speak up), to transmit messages as well. The specific technologies/machines are important, to be sure, but they often become inaudible and invisible, part of the background scenery—like the television sets hoisted above nearly every restaurant bar.

While some of us are inclined to think of these communication media as “mere tools,” they can have a transformative effect. Replacing sea or land transportation that takes days or even weeks, telegraphs allowed the transmission of important news in minutes. Telephones permit us to communicate almost instantly with people—known to us or not—close by or at great distances. Radio and television allow us
direct access
to what is going on all over the world—news, finance, sports—as it unfolds, and provide an endless diet of entertainment, ranging from slapstick comedy to soap operas to serious
drama. In December 1936, one could actually listen to King Edward VIII abdicate his throne; two years later, one could hear the cheers throughout Yankee Stadium as the black American boxer Joe Louis knocked out his German heavyweight opponent, Max Schmeling, in one round. Movies create stars and stories and scandals that are recognized around the globe.

While Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul reflected critically on the full range of tools and machines, Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan focused sharply on the mass media of communication that dominated the twentieth century.
³
He compared the world of radio and television with the earlier “Gutenberg galaxy,” the world of books and print, which literate people absorbed in linear order, at their own rate, with their often idiosyncratic system of markings of content. As McLuhan saw it, each medium—which he viewed as an extension of human sensory organs—alters the relation of the individual to the surrounding world. Absorbed by the eye, one saccade at a time, print pushed toward individuality, self-direction; in contrast, the electronic media of the twentieth century catalyzed a shared, ambient tribal consciousness. Media differed from one another in the extent to which they invited, or even permitted, active participation on the part of a member of the audience: “cool” invited or at least enabled participation, “hot” catalyzed passivity and dependence. In effect anticipating the Internet and the World Wide Web, McLuhan wrote about the emergence of a global village, in which humans around the planet increasingly partook, often simultaneously, of a single, generalized consciousness. It has been said that
in 1997, within two days of its occurrence, 98 percent of the world (except young children) knew about the death, in a car accident, of Britain's charismatic Princess Diana.