The App Generation (8 page)

It's high time for us to look directly at the three aspects of the lives of young people that have been most affected by the digital technology: their sense of identity, their capacity for intimate relations, and their imaginative powers. Later, in conclusion, we'll return to reflect on the effects that the app consciousness may have on other aspects of life today and, more speculatively, on the lives of future generations.

T
HE APPS ARRAYED ON
a person's smartphone or tablet represent a fingerprint of sorts—only instead of a unique pattern of ridges, it's the combination of interests, habits, and social connections that identify that person. A news app might be sandwiched between a fantasy sports app and a piano keyboard app, revealing multiple facets of one's identity. Because many of these apps provide access to various online communities, each facet allows the owner to find ready communion with similarly oriented people. Though the range of self-expression is great online, it's not unrestricted. For instance, expressions are limited to 140 characters on Twitter, whereas digitally manipulated photos are the coin of the realm on Instagram. The app identity, then, is multifaceted, highly personalized, outward-facing, and constrained by the programming decisions of the app designer.

Just how are youth's identities shaped and expressed in the age of the app? Are they truly different or just superficially so?
We approached these questions in a number of ways, including through extensive interviews and conversations with veteran educators. We found that, as suggested by the app icon itself, the identities of young people are increasingly packaged. That is, they are developed and put forth so that they convey a certain desirable—indeed, determinedly upbeat—image of the person in question. This packaging has the consequence of minimizing a focus on an inner life, on personal conflicts and struggles, on quiet reflection and personal planning; and as the young person approaches maturity, this packaging discourages the taking of risks of any sort. On the more positive side, there is also a broadening of acceptable identities (it's OK to be a geek; it's OK to be gay). Overall, life in an app-suffused society yields not only many small features of a person's identity but also a push toward an overall packaged sense of self—as it were, an omnibus app.

Digital media technologies have given rise to a plethora of new tools and contexts for youth to express and explore their identities—from social network sites, instant messaging platforms, and video-sharing sites, to blogs, vlogs, and virtual worlds. A growing number of youth enter these contexts through an app on their smartphone or tablet. The app interface then becomes an integral part of the way they choose to express themselves online. There are also apps designed specifically
for the purpose of encouraging users to play around with their online self-expression. One of Molly's favorites (at least at the time of writing), My Monster Voice, lets users manipulate their voice so that it sounds like one of a variety of preset monster sounds.

In the early days of the Web, scholars probed the many opportunities that the Internet opened up for identity exploration. In her seminal book
Life on the Screen,
published in 1995, MIT scholar Sherry Turkle depicted online spaces as identity playgrounds that give people the freedom to try on identities bearing little resemblance to their offline selves and lacking any repercussions in the physical world.
¹
Suddenly, it became possible to alter—with little effort—one's physical appearance, such as gender, eye and hair color, and height and weight, as well as aspects of one's personality, such as sense of humor and level of extraversion. Indeed, if one wanted, it was now possible to become a completely different species!

Turkle focused her initial investigation on the Internet users and online spaces of the mid-nineties, including online chat rooms and multiplayer virtual worlds (then known as MUDs for Multi-User Dungeons). The web has changed considerably over the past fifteen years. Social networking and microblogging sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr (each available in app form) have overshadowed the early—and far less populous—online chat rooms like Usenet. Now that a large proportion of the population in developed countries is online, one's friends and followers on these sites are likely to be known offline. Communication on these newer
sites is also far more visual, as smartphones and high-speed Internet make it easy to capture and share images and videos.

As a result of these developments, people are more identifiable online, their online lives more interwoven with their offline lives. Indeed, today's young people seldom make a distinction between their online and offline selves. As one of our interview participants, seventeen-year-old Janelle, told Katie: “I am the same person online and offline. So, what you get online is what you get offline, and what you get offline is what you can get online, as well. I'm not two different people.”

While there may be consistency between youth's online and offline selves, it's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. We gathered considerable evidence that youth take care to present a socially desirable,
polished self
online.
²
Features such as asynchronicity and anonymity (or at least the
feeling
of anonymity) allow young people to craft strategic self-presentations by deciding what information to highlight, downplay, exaggerate, or leave out entirely. Molly has firsthand experience with such carefully crafted online personas. She finds the endless stream of flattering photos, fun with friends, exciting vacations, and accomplishments on her Facebook newsfeed to be exhausting and alienating. “On Facebook, people are more concerned with making it look like they're living rather than actually living.”

Supporting the idea that youth present shined-up versions of themselves online, several of our subjects echoed the observation, made by Jenni, a high school senior: “I think everything about you kind of seems, like, glammed up [on
Facebook]. It is kind of, like, the rose-colored glasses, because people aren't going to share about how they got kicked off the soccer team because they were late for every school practice. They are going to share about how their team won; they led their team to victory.”

Note that, in seeking glammed-up versions of themselves online, Jenni and her peers don't include every detail about their lives. Such online omissions were common among the youth we interviewed. They consistently told us that their online identity is less complete than their offline identity. As fifteen-year-old Adam noted: “You wouldn't get my whole life story [by looking at my Facebook profile].” To explain this incompleteness, some youth pointed to the constraints of certain platforms and computer-mediated communication in general. A more common explanation, however, related to youth's privacy concerns. Though several youth identified strangers as the people from whom they most wanted privacy, more youth actually identified known others, such as their friends and family.
³
Jenni explained, “On Facebook, there are things that you don't want to tell people; like, you don't want to put up personal things for your random friends to see.”

Whatever may have been the case fifteen or twenty years ago, donning wholly different identities online may not be the norm among today's youth. Still, there's certainly ample room for exploration and experimentation. Consider Molly's trajectory of online activities. Where Facebook once represented the central hub of her online activities, she now finds herself spending less time there as her online presence has broadened
to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. At one point, she tried her hand at blogging about boarding school life. More recently, she joined Twitter and Tumblr. On Twitter, Molly follows comedians and actors, and she herself tweets, as she puts it, “sarcastic irrelevancies from my life.” Like others her age, Molly uses Tumblr mostly to read and reblog others' posts that relate to her particular blend of pop culture interests.
⁴
These diverse online venues let Molly express and explore different sides of herself and, through that exploration, contemplate who she might become in the future.

Molly's experiences are consistent with what we heard from several youth we interviewed. Some of them told us that, whereas they're soft-spoken and shy in person, they present a more outgoing or extroverted personality online. And of course, multiplayer virtual worlds remain popular among many youth. Brandon, age sixteen, told us about his experiences playing World of Warcraft. As a human warlock, he explained, “I have to assume the character, so it is more of a darker type person, I suppose, as the warlocks traditionally are darker.” He said that “it can be pretty fun” to present himself in a different way in the game world than he's used to presenting himself in offline contexts.

How, if at all, are these new tools and contexts for self-expression influencing the way young people approach the
task of identity development? Should we take at face value the consistency that most youth insist exists between their online and offline selves, or would a deeper, more skeptical probe reveal substantive differences? Do apps open up or constrain identity expression? To explore these questions, we examine how certain aspects of youth identity have changed over the past twenty years. For each area of change, we consider the role that our new media landscape has played. And we keep in mind Erik Erikson's original formulation of a healthy identity—a multifaceted but ultimately coherent sense of self that is personally satisfying while at the same time being recognized and affirmed by the surrounding community.
⁵

Our focus group participants believe that the identities of today's App Generation are more externally oriented than the identities of predigital youth. For the affluent youth, their focus largely rests on presenting a polished, packaged self that will meet the approval of college admissions officers and prospective employers. They appear to regard themselves increasingly as objects that have quantifiable value to others: an SAT score, a GPA, a collection of varsity letters, trophies, community service certifications, or other awards. One religious leader echoed the sentiments of the other participants in his focus group when he said that, for many young people, “Who am I?” means “What am I going to produce?”

Accompanying this sensibility is a calculated effort to maximize
one's value in order to achieve academic and professional success. One participant in a focus group said that when youth are asked what their hopes are, they give “pragmatic, achievable answers” situated in the present or near future such as “a good job” or “a good relationship” more often than was the case with youth from earlier generations. During our conversation with the therapists, a participant declared that many of today's young people suffer from a “planning delusion”—a (mistaken) faith that if they make careful, practical plans, they will face no future challenges or obstacles to success.

We've witnessed this firsthand in our freshman reflection seminars at Harvard. Many students come to college with their lives all mapped out—a super-app. “I'll major in government, join the Institute of Politics, intern in DC in the summer, work for Teach for America, then run for state senator in my home district when I'm twenty-eight.” Paths to the likes of Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, architectural design or neurosurgery, follow similar trajectories. Put in Eriksonian terms, the students' identities are prematurely foreclosed because they don't allow themselves space to explore alternatives. Not only is this mentality unrealistic (you might flunk organic chemistry, you might flub your interview at Google), but, importantly, it makes those kids who do
not
have their identities all mapped out—who lack the super-app—feel that they are losing out. And that's a reason why they come to the reflection sessions.

The trend toward stepwise progression along a path to success is reflected in the reports of other scholars. Their research points to a generation of youth that is increasingly career-focused
and pragmatic, as well as more issue-oriented and less ideological.
⁶
Today's youth approach their education as “practical credentialists” who complete the tasks necessary to get the diploma they need to secure a desirable job.
⁷
They are far more focused on “daily life management” than on developing a long-term purpose. Consider that in 1967, 86 percent of college freshmen said that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” is “very important” or “essential” to them, compared to just 46 percent in 2012.
⁸

The pragmatic, careerist focus of today's college students occurs within the context of a broader societal trend toward individualism and away from a more community-minded, institutional orientation. In his landmark book
Bowling Alone,
political scientist Robert Putnam shows that Americans' participation in various civic institutions, such as bowling leagues, labor unions, and church organizations, has declined steadily across cohorts born after World War II.
⁹
As these community ties loosen, they're replaced by a “moral freedom” that allows individuals to define for themselves the meaning of a virtuous life and doesn't require them to sacrifice their personal needs and desires in the process.
¹⁰

In one study, researchers found evidence of growing individualism in American culture through a survey of tween-focused television shows airing from 1967 to 2007.
¹¹
Their examination of the values depicted in these shows revealed that fame, an individualistic value, was promoted to a greater degree in the recent shows, which included
Hannah Montana
and
American Idol.
In contrast, communitarian values such as
benevolence, tradition, and community feeling were emphasized more in shows from earlier decades, such as
The Andy Griffith Show
and
I Love Lucy.
The researchers also found that, in comparison with older cohorts, younger cohorts were more attuned to individualistic values in TV shows.