The App Generation (6 page)

The newly emerging
other-directed individual
took cues neither—in tradition-directed form—from those who came before nor—in inner-directed fashion—from a self-constructed value system. Rather, in Riesman's formulation, as models for belief, action, and, above all, consumption, other-directed individuals looked to the examples of their neighbors and to those peers, role models, and certified “experts” about whom they acquired information via the media. A powerful force in bringing about an other-directed mentality were the mass media—radio, television, and perhaps most powerfully Hollywood movies—each of which had come into its own by that time and had become part of the shared consciousness of the nation, if not the world beyond its borders. (We cannot help wondering whether, if Riesman and colleagues were updating
their book today, they would introduce a fourth form of character: “app-directed.”)

Indeed, the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961) stands out as a time of conformity and at least superficial agreement on what constitutes a viable society, a good society. The era of
The Organization Man, The Wise Men, The Uncommitted,
and
The Power Elite
(to cite just a few of the best-selling book titles chronicling the period) was marked by a relative lack of turbulence; an acceptance of authority from the center (rather than from earlier generations or from one's own internal gyroscope); a proclivity to tend one's own garden without undue immersion in politics; and a perhaps studied avoidance of what we later came to term hot-button issues (race, sex, and, yes, the war between the generations).
⁶

As it happens, another equally influential book
Childhood and Society,
by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, was also published in 1950.
⁷
While
The Lonely Crowd
is remembered for the three forms of directedness that have characterized American society over the years,
Childhood and Society
is distinguished for its delineation of eight principal crises confronted by individuals everywhere over the course of their lives. In each case, the life crisis or tension is inevitable; it cannot be bypassed altogether. And should attempts be made to short-circuit the crisis or to end it prematurely, its lack of adequate, settled resolution will haunt individuals for the remainder of their lives.

Of particular interest for our inquiry are the three crises confronted by young people as they emerge from the years of
middle childhood to the years of adult maturity. According to Erikson, the first of these “adolescence and beyond” crises surrounds the challenge of identity formation. Beyond childhood, each of us must forge a persona that fits comfortably with our own desires and aspirations; at the same time, the formation of identity cannot be solipsistic—it must also make sense to the surrounding community. It is permissible to have an extended period of identity formation, sometimes characterized by the formidable descriptor “psychosocial moratorium.” But if identity is not properly formed and expressed, far less palatable outcomes ensue. One may settle for a mixture of inadequately formulated identities, called “identity diffusion” or “role diffusion” (the burden of the “organization man” in the big corporation or of Arthur Miller's rootless traveling salesman, Willy Loman), or one may end up forging an identity that opposes the major values of the society, called a “negative identity” (the burden of
The Wild Ones
on their motorcycles or of Willy Loman's feckless and rebellious sons). And because an unresolved or inadequately solved crisis affects life downstream, individuals lacking a solid coherent identity have difficulty in forming intimate relations, rearing the next generation, forging new paths, and achieving satisfying closure at the end of life.

Following the resolution—adequate or inadequate—of the “identity crisis,” the next challenge is the consolidation of a sense of intimacy: the capacity to have deep, meaningful relations with others, and especially with the significant other, usually one's spouse. In the world described by Erikson, it is
crucial to be able to have a multifaceted, abiding relationship with one or a few other individuals. In its absence, one ends up feeling isolated, alone, disconnected. As we'll explore later, experts on digital technologies have speculated that, despite their many electronic connections to one another, many young people today paradoxically have a sense of isolation.

The conflicts of middle life—say, the decades of one's thirties through the decades of the fifties or sixties—are described by Erikson as ones involving generativity versus stagnation.
Generativity
has a literal meaning: the generative individual forms a family and raises the next generation of offspring as well as guiding others for whom one has responsibility. Generativity can also have a broader connotation; rather than simply repeating what has happened in earlier times, the generative individual is able to use his or her knowledge and skills to initiate new thoughts, open up new venues, make a contribution to society, and lead a life that may inspire others. On the downside, for one or another reason, the middle-aged person may be unable to have a family of any sort and may be equally stymied in the deployment of his or her creative and imaginative powers. Like a motionless body of water, such a middle-aged life is stagnant, in permanent “idle.” One recalls Biff Loman's lament to his mother, Linda, “I just can't take hold, Mom. I can't take hold of some kind of a life.”
⁸
In our own study, we have focused on those cognitive capacities that enable individuals to think and act in new ways, going beyond and sometimes in contradiction to the paths followed by tradition or by others: we've termed them “imaginative powers.”

An aside: Although it occurs before adolescence, the fourth life crisis (industry versus inferiority) may be relevant to our study. The industrious young person masters the various tasks and challenges of the society—in the case of modern society, primarily those challenges posed in school. If one negotiates these well, one should be on the way to a relatively smooth adolescence. One might speculate that the ability to use apps, to master the ensemble of apps, smoothes the way to adolescence—so long as the apps are well understood and used appropriately. But what constitutes appropriate use is not self-evident. Adapting Riesman's terminology to today's society, we believe more and more young people are app-dependent than app-enabled.

Against the sociological background provided by David Riesman and his colleagues and the psychological landscape sketched by Erik Erikson, what can we say about the media-technology milieu in America in the middle decades of the twentieth century—when Howard grew up? As we have mentioned, the era of the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the mass media. Radio and movies (first silent films, then talkies, then films in Technicolor) were already part of the cultural landscape; and television was quickly becoming an even more powerful medium, dominating eyes and ears in most households and essentially constituting a monopoly in the hands of
three networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC. Metaphorically speaking, the whole country would tune in to comedy shows like
I Love Lucy,
variety shows like
The Ed Sullivan Show,
quiz shows like
The $64,000 Question,
and dramas of the serious
Playhouse 90
or more popular
Gunsmoke
ilk. In a way that is difficult for younger persons to appreciate today, news was presented every evening, in the 1950s for fifteen minutes, thereafter for half an hour; and if you wanted to know what was happening in the world, you would tune in to hear Walter Cronkite (CBS), Howard K. Smith (ABC), or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC) report the day's events in mellifluous, masculine midwestern tones. Indeed, Cronkite finished each nightly broadcast with the authoritative phrase “That's the way it is”—and if you were not quite sure that you understood the way it was, Cronkite's sober sidekick Eric Sevareid was on hand, ready to explain it to you. For those who preferred to get the news and entertainment from print and still photographs, the media emanating from the Henry Luce publishing empire—
Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated
—had an informing power and pervasiveness that has not been approached since.

Of course, these media were almost entirely receptive. Except for the very few individuals who created “content,” the overwhelming majority of the population participated as consumers. By midcentury, powerful computers were already being built, but they were seen as the province of science and military, as well as—at quadrennial election time—projectors of who would win the major political contests. On a daily,
interactive basis, computers were the concern of only a tiny circle of scientists and technologists gathered in American cities like Cambridge, Palo Alto, and Princeton (and in British cities like Manchester, Edinburgh, and Cambridge). Similarly, for every individual who was an active ham radio operator, many thousands of users never thought to assemble or disassemble a radio or television set.

Put briefly, the media offered relatively few choices and very little conflict. People across the land spent much time watching or listening to the same media or reading the same mass publications, typically at the same time. In that sense they readily fashioned a population that was “other-directed”—that shared a sensibility with its geographical and technological neighbors. But at least in Howard's experience, these media of communication did not dominate life in the ways that they have come to in more recent times. There was still time to play, to daydream, to create things on one's own. When children went to camp in the summer, they rarely had contact with parents except by the US mail service, and when they traveled abroad or went away to college, contact was weekly or even less frequently. The concept of a helicopter parent was decades away.

The situation could not be more different from that which obtains today. Howard has taught students intermittently in the 1960s and 1970s and regularly ever since. With every passing decade, it appears to Howard that students look increasingly to their teachers—and more broadly, to their supervisors and their mentors—for the correct way, for what
is wanted, for the route to an “A,” to approval, to a positive letter of recommendation, smoothing the way to the next step on the ladder of success. There's more. Many students convey the impression that the authority figures know just what they want from their charges; that they could be straightforward and say what is wanted; and that they are being irresponsible, delinquent, unfair, and even unethical in withholding the recipe, the road map. The light-hearted version of this attitude is the all-too-familiar question, “Will this be on the exam?” The nuts-and-bolts version is, “Just tell us what you want and we will give it to you.” Even tougher, “If you don't tell us what you want and how to deliver it, we'll get our parents out after you and sue the university—and you.”

In our terms, the students are searching for the relevant app. The app exists, the teacher certainly knows it, and fair play entails providing it to the students, as efficiently and straightforwardly as possible. To be sure, given acquiescence on the part of the teacher, the students face a choice. They can use the app in the way that they believe the teacher wants them to use it. But of course the students also have the freedom to use the app flexibly or even to tweak it in new and unexpected directions. The prescient teacher can signal which option he or she prefers.

Of course, the United States has long been a large and diverse country, with millions of young people growing up at any one time. (The same can be said of France and Germany, to cite two other countries mentioned in our narrative.) Almost any generalizations about youth are likely to invite—
and deserve—modifications as well as counterexamples. To contextualize our portrait of youth in the middle of the last century, it should be said at the outset that Riesman, Erikson, and their colleagues are describing middle-class youth—not necessarily youth of wealth, and certainly not extreme inherited wealth, but youth who had access to education and were not caught in an endless cycle (or “culture”) of poverty. They were more likely to have been males than females, more likely to have been white than of color, and more likely to have had lofty than middling aspirations, whether or not these were actually achieved. At the same time, we believe that the portrait we've sketched here has reasonably broad applicability, particularly as a comparison to youth growing up a half century later (and, for that matter, youth growing up in earlier generations).

So much for the America in which Howard grew up. By the 1960s, in the technological sphere, advances in the media of communication, knowledge creation, and knowledge dispersion were rapid, even dizzying. Led and spurred by Silicon Valley in northern California, echoed in the concentric circles around other large cities in North America, Europe, East Asia, and Israel, the world entered—sometimes invisibly, sometimes ceremonially, sometimes dramatically—the Digital Age. Mainframe computers were followed—and oft-times replaced—by
increasingly small and powerful desktop computers; and these in turn, came to be supplanted by laptops, tablets, personal assistants, smartphones, and other handheld devices. Mainframe computers were bulky and clunky. The newer devices had more power and portability, and they operated much more speedily. The hegemony of the major broadcast networks was broken, as cable TV ushered in a proliferation of new channels, many heavily dependent on digital technologies. Perhaps most important, the various digital devices were no longer independent, non-communicating entities. Increasingly, single devices could carry out many functions, and such devices were able to communicate with one another.