The App Generation (7 page)

Back to our story about the generations, but with an unexpected twist. In mid-twentieth-century America, generations were routinely spoken of in terms of their defining political experiences or powerful cultural forces. Only in recent memory has characterization of a generation taken on a distinctly technological flavor. In his studies of successive waves of college students, Arthur Levine (with colleagues) has discerned a revealing trend. Students in the latter decades of the twentieth century characterized themselves in terms of their common experiences vis-à-vis the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Watergate burglary and investigation, the shuttle disaster, the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. But once the opening years of the twenty-first century had passed, political events increasingly took a back seat. Instead, young people spoke about the common experiences of their generation in terms of the Internet, the web, handheld devices, and
smartphones, along with the social and cultural connections that they enabled—most prominently, the social networking platform Facebook.
⁹

Now it could be that we are living in an exceptional time, one particularly—surprisingly, unprecedentedly, perhaps uniquely—inflected by technological innovations. Should this be the case, we can anticipate that future generations may return to self-characterizations in terms of more traditional political, social, and cultural events. But it could also be that young people have shifted sharply—and maybe permanently—from political events as defining; they think of themselves increasingly as part and parcel of the latest, most trendy, most powerful technological devices. Neither Jacques Ellul nor Lewis Mumford would be surprised. We can't know which is the case. We
do
know that this is how individuals born, roughly speaking, in Molly's time—say, from 1990 to 2000—choose to describe themselves to pollsters and researchers in the social sciences.

Indeed, we may be straddling one of those fault lines in history when the definition of a generation needs to be recalibrated. If, in fact, our era is defined in terms of technology, then a generation may be quite brief; indeed, we should think of a generation as that era in which certain technologies rise to the fore and, in particular, when young people—usually the “early adopters”—come to employ particular technologies in a full, natural, seamless, “native” way. If we take this timetable with a generous dollop of seasoning, consider the emergence and widespread use in succession of these various electronic and digital technologies and media:

Telegraph, telephone: late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries

Radio, movies: 1920s–1940s

Network television: 1950–1960s

Cable television: 1970s onward

Personal computers: 1980s onward

Internet, email, World Wide Web: 1990s onward

Digital consumption (eBay, Amazon): middle 1990s onward

The twenty-first century

Web 2.0—blogs, wikis, social networking sites

Multiuser games and other virtual worlds

Texting and instant messaging

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram

Proliferation of apps

Simple calculations, even eyeballing, suggest that a
technological generation
may be much briefer than earlier genealogical, political, economic, or cultural generations. Indeed, although Katie is only seventeen years older than Molly, her experience of technology has been radically different. Nor does this short-lived generation necessarily correlate with calendrical, political, or cultural considerations. Indeed, a single decade might harbor a number of technological generations, even as a single powerful technological change like the web certainly cuts across the decades.

We've even heard some young people restrict the word
technology
to instances of hardware or software that came into
existence during their own conscious lives. If already present when they were very young, the form of technology is just part of the background scenery. On this wry reading, the history of technology is divided into two phases: “What I remember as it erupted on the scene” versus “All previous inventions”!

Another possibility: Going forward, we may need to think of generations operating on a number of quasi-independent timescales. There is the biological generation, defined by child birth; the calendrical generation, defined by decades (or quarter centuries); the political, cultural, or social generation defined by Traditional Big Events; and the technological generation, marked by newly emerging technologies or significantly different kinds of relations to already existing technologies. As we reflect on and attempt to characterize generations, we need to bear in mind these competing definitions, along with the tensions and confluences across them.

To this congeries of “generation talk,” we'd add one final consideration. Scholars and observers from a variety of perspectives have converged on the view that, in developed countries, adolescence has recently been extended in length; in the phrase favored by some, there is a new phase of “emerging adulthood.”
¹⁰
This re-computation of long-standing, well-entrenched life cycle distinctions has been brought out by lengthier educational tracks, a challenging job market, limited family resources, and shrinking safety nets. And so it is far more common today than it was twenty-five years ago for young people in their twenties to live at the parental home, whether or not they can contribute in any way to the family income. It's
entirely possible to have persons aged ten, seventeen, twenty-five, forty, and sixty living under the same roof, even though their relations to technology can be dramatically different.

If our analysis is on the mark, we now have a new perspective on the generational issue: invoking the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, we can think of generations in terms of the dominant media and the habits of mind, behavior, presentation of self, and relation to others that they foster—as well as those that they minimize or even expunge.

It is easy and straightforward to speak of the generation of the past decade or so as the “digital” or “web” generation. But in our view, that focuses misleadingly on the technology per se. In invoking the epithet the App Generation, we seek to go beyond the technology, and beyond the media of communication, into the psychology of the users. In the spirit of Jacques Ellul, we aim to capture the cognitive, social, emotional, and even ethical dimensions of what it is like to be a young person today. Living in a world in which there are so many applications at one's fingertips, and so many new ones emerging each month, one is led, perhaps ineluctably, to the following conclusion: What we think, say, do, and dream for ourselves, and how we relate to others, are most perspicuously thought of as apps, whether we are thinking about what to do in the next minute, in the next day, or—in super-app fashion—for the rest of our lives.

While Howard was viewing the Promised Digital Land from afar, Katie, growing up three decades later, saw it much closer—and Molly was thrust right in the middle of it, with
little sense of what it was like to live in a time permeated by mass media but innocent of digital hegemony.

Katie's youth in the 1980s and early 1990s took place amid the ever-shrinking and increasingly popular personal computer; the rise of cable television, along with the 24/7 news cycle and reality TV shows it spawned; the gradual decline of pay phones and landlines and their replacement by mobile phones; and, most memorably for Katie, the introduction of the World Wide Web, version 1.0.

As a result of growing up on a small island and in a household with a tight budget, Katie's experience of these trends lagged behind many of her American counterparts. The “big three” television networks reigned supreme throughout her childhood and most of her adolescence. Much as Walter Cronkite had done for Howard and his peers, CBS news anchor Dan Rather informed Katie about the
Challenger
crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student protests in Tiananmen Square, and the alarming spread of AIDS in the United States.

Things had started to change by the time the first Gulf War started (and ended) in 1991. Notably, Katie's father and stepmother had gotten cable TV installed in their house. Every Sunday and Wednesday when Katie visited, the three of them watched raptly as Operation Desert Storm unfolded in real time on CNN.

CNN was still the go-to source of round-the-clock news coverage when the Twin Towers fell ten years later. Molly was only five in 2001, but her memories of the event are vivid. Even though she was in a different country and many miles away, the 24/7 news cycle (and her mother's journalistic background and penchant for the news) made it difficult to escape the images and sounds from the tragedy and its aftermath.

Keeping track of—and increasingly contributing to—the news continued to change at warp speed throughout the opening decade of the new millennium. In 2006, Myspace helped students organize a massive, nationwide protest against proposed immigration legislation. Later that year, Saddam Hussein's execution was caught on a mobile phone, and within hours the video was posted on the Internet. The 2008 presidential election was widely dubbed the Facebook Election, the candidates having learned from Howard Dean's successful use of social media to raise awareness and money for his 2004 presidential campaign. And a mere five years after its inception, Twitter was famously used by protesters and journalists during the Arab Spring in 2011.

These digital media contributed to Molly's growing consciousness of the world outside of Bermuda. Compared to Katie's youth, her experiences of this wider world and the events therein have been more vivid, immediate, and interactive.

Like most kids her age, Molly is more likely to use her digital devices to participate and keep track of pop culture than to follow political events as they unfold. Throughout her childhood, reality television has represented a large slice of her
pop culture diet. Though it reached a critical mass only in the twenty-first century, reality TV traces its roots at least as far back as the 1992 debut of
The Real World,
MTV's landmark reality series about a group of twenty-somethings living together under one roof. Lacking regular access to cable in the 1990s, Katie never watched the show during her youth, but she and Molly recently came across the first episode of the first season while browsing the television shows on Hulu (Molly watches most of her television on such video-streaming sites). Both sisters were struck by how civil the participants were to each other, as well as by the show's lack of structure and story arc. This episode stands in stark contrast to its modern incarnation and the scores of other reality series that have sprung up since then. Today's shows pivot on high drama, whether it's competing to be the last survivor on a remote island, the last woman standing in a battle to wed an eligible bachelor, or America's next top model, fashion designer, performer, or chef.

The Internet made it possible for Molly and Katie to watch a 1992 episode of
The Real World
on Molly's laptop in 2012. For Molly, that statement is unremarkable because the Internet itself is unremarkable. But for Katie, it still seems a bit magical. After all, she knew nothing of the Internet until 1995, her senior year of high school, when her English teacher took the class on a “field trip” downstairs to the school library and introduced them to the World Wide Web. With great fanfare, he opened up a Netscape Navigator browser and typed in the web address for a site dedicated to Shakespeare's sonnets.
The considerably older teacher who co-taught the course took one look at the small font, clashing colors, and pop-up ads and dismissed the whole thing out of hand, saying, “It'll never last.” He pointed out that all of this information was already available in books. He insisted that no one would ever choose to read on a screen instead of in print. He questioned how one could determine the credibility of anything posted on the web.

Needless to say, he was wrong (as wrong as IBM's CEO Thomas Watson, who had been quoted as predicting—either in 1943 or in 1958; sources do not agree—that there would be need for only five mainframe computers in the world!).
¹¹
The Internet has grown from just sixteen million users worldwide in 1995 to well over two billion in 2012. We can do far more online than anyone imagined in 1995. No longer regarded primarily as a content-delivery system, the Internet is highly dynamic and participatory. The problem of screen-reading is largely resolved (thanks in part to e-reader apps like Kindle and Stanza). Credibility issues remain, but with the likes of the
BBC
and the
New York Times
online, plenty of reputable sites do exist.

As Katie was being introduced to the World Wide Web at school, her mother was eight months' pregnant with her second daughter, who would be born in January 1996 without any knowledge of a pre-Internet world. Whereas Katie didn't get her first email account until her first year of college, her first laptop a year after that, and her first cell phone about eight years after that, Molly has trouble remembering any of these firsts. In this way she resembles the dozens of
youth whom we studied directly or learned about from our interviews of informed adults. Her struggles around issues of identity, intimacy, and imagination will be played out against a background that could not have been envisioned a half century ago.

We've now provided the promised backdrops for our discoveries. To begin, we furnished a lexicon so that we could examine the contributions of media and technology to behaviors and consciousness in earlier eras. We've gone back to the traditional biological meaning of “generation” and contrasted that to more recent descriptions in terms of consciousness and technology. Then, drawing on major sociological and psychological studies of America in the first half of the twentieth century and with an eye toward the different worlds in which Howard, Katie, and Molly have grown up, we have contrasted the mass media world in the 1950s with the increasingly dominant digital milieu of recent decades.