The App Generation (5 page)

In light of the alternative scenarios, let's return to the three topics we're investigating here.

With respect to
identity formation:
Apps can short-circuit identity formation, pushing you into being someone else's avatar (that of your parents, your friends, or one formulated by some app producer)—or, by foregrounding various options, they can allow you to approach identity formation more deliberately, holistically, thoughtfully. You may end up with a stronger and more powerful identity, or you may succumb to a prepackaged identity or to endless role diffusion.

With respect to
intimacy:
Apps can facilitate superficial ties, discourage face-to-face confrontations and interactions, suggest that all human relations can be classified if not predetermined in advance—or they can expose you to a much wider world, provide novel ways of relating to people, while not preventing you from shutting off the devices as warranted—and
that puts
YOU
in charge of the
APPS
rather than vice versa. You may end up with deeper and longer-lasting relations to others, or with a superficial stance better described as cool, isolated, or transactional.

With respect to
imagination:
Apps can make you lazy, discourage the development of new skills, limit you to mimicry or tiny trivial tweaks or tweets—or they can open up whole new worlds for imagining, creating, producing, remixing, even forging new identities and enabling rich forms of intimacy.

The Flywheel can liberate you or keep you going around in circles.

As for the probability of these various alternatives, heated debate already exists in the writings of the digerati. On the one side we find unabashed enthusiasts of the digital world. In the view of experts like danah boyd, Cathy Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, and David Weinberger, the digital media hold the promise of ushering in an age of unparalleled democratic participation, mastery of diverse skills and areas of knowledge, and creative expression in various media, singularly or orchestrally.
¹³
As they see it, for perhaps the first time in human history, it is possible for each of us to have access to the full range of information and opinions, to inform ourselves, to make judicious decisions about or our own lives, to form links with others who want to achieve similar goals—be they political, economic, or cultural—and to benefit from the enhanced intelligence and wisdom enabled by a vast multi-networked system. On this perspective, a world replete with apps is a world in which endless options arise, with at least the
majority tilted in positive, world-building, personally fulfilling directions. It's a constructivist's dream.

Others are less sanguine. Nicholas Carr claims that, with their speed and brevity, the digital media encourage superficial thinking, thereby thwarting the sustained reading and reflection enabled broadly by the Gutenberg era.
¹⁴
Raising the stakes, Mark Bauerlein invokes the inflammatory epithet “the dumbest generation.”
¹⁵
Cass Sunstein fears that the digital media encourage us to consort with like-minded persons; far from exposing us to a range of opinions and broadening our horizons, the media enable—or, more perniciously, dictate—the creation of intellectual and artistic silos or echo chambers.
¹⁶
Sherry Turkle worries about an increasing sense of isolation and the demise of open, exploratory conversations, while Jaron Lanier laments threats to our poetic, musical, and artistic souls.
¹⁷
On this perspective, an app-filled world brings about dependence on the particulars of each currently popular app, and a general expectation that one's future—indeed, the future itself—will be dictated by the technological options of the time. It's a constructivist's nightmare.

Drawn from diverse sources, our data speak to these debates. As we argue in what follows, the emergence of an “app” culture allows individuals readily to enact superficial aspects of identity, intimacy, and imagination. Whether we can go on to fulfill our full potential in these spheres, to take advantage of apps (“enabling”) without being programmed by them (“dependent”), remains a formidable challenge.

E
VER SINCE HUMANS BECAME
aware that organisms are reproduced, it has been possible to think of life in terms of generations. Literally, any person, nonhuman animal, or plant is the product of the preceding (parental) generation and in turn has the potential to spawn the succeeding (or offspring) generation. (For present purposes, we'll ignore the hapless mule.) Those of us raised in the Judeo-Christian traditions probably first encountered the formal idea of generations in the Bible—through the endless list of “begats.” And of course, any young person who strays beyond the nuclear family encounters individuals of older generations—aunts, uncles, grandparents, the odd great-grandparent of a far-removed generation, as well as members of one's own generation—cousins of various stripes and degrees of separation. Given the traditional generational spans, Katie could easily be Howard's daughter, Molly his granddaughter.

Bearing in mind considerations of conception, calendars,
and consciousness, what is a generation and how long does it last? In the classical era and in biblical times, the definition of a generation seems to have been straightforward: a generation spanned the period from one's birth to the time that one had offspring, at which point the offspring's own generational clock began to tick until it had children (more technically, the time from the birth of a woman to the birth of her first child). We need to bear in mind that life spans in those days were much shorter—if we exclude the biblical patriarch Methuselah, who purportedly reached the mind-boggling age of 969 years—and that adulthood began in effect at or shortly after the onset of puberty. (Some authorities suggest that, like the average life span, the length of a familial generation has virtually doubled in the course of recorded history—from fourteen to fifteen years to twenty-eight to thirty years.) We should also note that if there were informal characterizations of generations—say, the generation that went on the First Crusade to the Holy Land or the generation that lived when the Americas were discovered—these descriptors would have been less likely to be widely known and certainly less bandied about in a pre–mass media age.

Related to the definition of a generation is the way in which periods of life have been described. As far back as Homeric Greece, when the riddle of the Sphinx was initially posed, there has certainly been a recognition of the difference between the young child (four legs), the mature adult (two legs), and the old person (three legs)—though that older person might well be forty or fifty, rather than the biblical “three
score and ten.” Shakespeare memorably delineated the seven stages of man. We cannot know precisely which chronological ages the Bard had in mind nor the duration of each stage. But we can assume that the period of
youth
came after that of the
infant
and the
schoolboy
, and before the latter three ages of
justice, early old age,
and
second childhood.
More concretely, using the descriptors favored by Shakespeare, we can point to
lovers
—like Romeo and Juliet—and
soldiers
—like the stage versions of Henry V or Richard II.

Parenthetically, we should note a tendency among elders to look critically at the younger generations. This sentiment goes back at least to the time of the Roman playwright Plautus, who reportedly quipped, “Manners are always declining.” Far more recently, poet and playwright T. S. Eliot noted, “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidence of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.”
¹
Fortunately, in the case of our study, harsh judgments that Howard the Elder might be inclined to make are balanced by the more upbeat views of Katie the Younger and Molly the Youngest.

Those, then, are biological or genealogical generations. Once historians, sociologists, and literary critics came on the scene, a new incarnation of generations appeared. Generations came to be associated not merely with those who gave birth to you, or those with whom you shared a dwelling, but also with the kinds of experiences that you shared with peers. We argue here that, in our own time, the digital technologies
usher in a new sense of the concept
generation
—one that has implications both for the length of a generation and how its consciousness may be affected. Specifically, the emergence of digital technology in general—and of apps in particular—has produced a unique generation: wrought by technology, fundamentally different in consciousness from its predecessors, and, just possibly, ushering in a series of ever shorter, technologically defined generations.

The feeling of common experiences of members of a generation is brought forth evocatively in Gustav Flaubert's novel of mid-nineteenth-century France,
L'Éducation sentimentale.
On the surface, the novel is about the desires, aspirations, and anxieties of the protagonist Frédéric Moreau, as he attempts to find a career, companionship, romance, love, financial security, and a recognized place in Parisian society. Much of the novel consists of Frédéric hanging around his male peers who are also in search of a calling or place in life, along with more momentary pleasures in games of chance, nighttime chats, and love affairs. They talk about almost everything imaginable—art, music, literature, philosophy, religion, economics, politics—from communism and socialism to monarchical regimes. (For future reference: Note the importance of conversation—in Parisian circles, the cognitive equivalent of breathing!) We learn of their aspirations as they approach adulthood and of their disappointments and regrets as they reach midlife. Flaubert was after even bigger game: “I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their
feelings.
It's a book about love,
about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive.”
²

Flaubert may have been a pioneer in the literary evocation of a generation. In his dramatic treatment of Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), the German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was another—but by the early twentieth century, it had become common to describe young people in terms neither of their parents nor of their date of birth but rather of their common experiences. Following many years of relative peace for those not in the professional military, the eruption in Europe of the First World War gave rise to the “generation of 1914,” millions of whom died in trench warfare or were forever scarred by their experiences in battle or, less commonly, by their avoidance of combat. Only a few short years thereafter, American writer Gertrude Stein looked at her fellow expatriates in postwar Paris and famously declared, “All of you who served in the war . . . you are a lost generation.”
³

By the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, membership in a generation was no longer thought of primarily in gendered or geographical terms. Individuals from families that were once comfortable, or at least employed, confronted a new reality in which neither shelter nor employment nor even, at times, food was guaranteed. Genuine recovery for the multitudes did not occur until a decade later and was clearly stimulated by mobilization for the second major war of the century. The national unity spurred by the struggle against Fascism led, in retrospect, to the epithet “The Greatest Generation.”

A consequence of the emergence of mass media was the proliferation of generational characterizations both in the United States and abroad. The fifties saw the Silent Generation and the Beat Generation, the sixties saw the rise of hippies, flower children, young radicals, and the stark epithet “The Sixties Generation” . . . and so on, leading to the perhaps deliberately non-revealing appellations Generations X, Y, and Z of recent decades. Indeed, calendrical considerations created pressures for each decade to feature a separate characterization of youth—from the Silent Fifties to the Revolutionary Sixties to the Conservative Seventies.
⁴

For analytical and expository purposes, it is helpful to choose a point in time with which to compare our current app-suffused era. We believe that the best time is the middle of the twentieth century; the best “place” is the America of the middle class. We select this era because it is the last time that one can write about society without explicit reference to computers; the time that Howard—our specimen digital immigrant—grew up; and the publication date of two important literary guides—one from sociology, one from psychology—that have been key in framing our inquiry.

The Lonely Crowd,
a sociological study by David Riesman and his colleagues published in 1950, captured this period
memorably.
⁵
On their account, earlier periods in American history were dominated by two forms of national character. The
tradition-directed individual
looked to the examples of those who came in preceding generations for patterns of what to believe and how to behave. We may think in this context of families from the Old World whose patriarchal and matriarchal figures in effect dictated what the younger generation should and should not do. Using the parental generation as a point of departure, the
inner-directed individual
attempted to develop an internal compass that came to govern his or her behavior and belief systems. Prototypical inner-directed individuals cut their ties from home and went to seek fame and fortune in the Wild West, the big city, or the recesses of their own imaginative powers.