The App Generation (9 page)

This form of individualism of the twenty-first century is quite different from the inner-directedness esteemed by David Riesman and his colleagues in the middle of the last century. Indeed, it seems more a product of “other-directedness”—a concern with what other persons esteem. But there's a clear difference. The other-directedness of 1950 came from direct observations of the nearby Jones family or from portrayals in the mass media. The present variety of other directedness is more likely to derive from the configuration of the currently most popular social app, or from scanning the various profiles available online, or from a combination of such factors.

Individualism goes hand in hand with a focus on the self, and there's evidence that today's youth are more self-focused than youth in decades past. Psychologists often use a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) to measure levels of narcissism, or an inflated sense of self. The NPI includes such items as “If I ruled the world it would be a better place” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” In one study, researchers found that only 19 percent of college students taking the test in the early 1980s scored above 21 (considered a high score).
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By the mid- to late 2000s, fully 30 percent of students scored over 21. A similar trend was found in surveys of high school seniors.
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Compared to students surveyed in
the 1970s, high school students in 2006 reported being more satisfied with themselves and had higher scores on self-liking measures.

The rise in volunteerism and social entrepreneurship among today's young people seems at odds with these statistics. It's true that the percentage of youth participating in some form of community service has risen notably in recent decades.
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Although we see this trend as distinctly positive, we're also mindful that, for many young persons, their motivation may stem more from a desire to pad their resume than to give back to society. Seen in this light, the current rise in volunteerism among today's youth may be a product of the packaged self: it's a box to check off as one follows the super-app of life.

To make sense of youth's growing self-focus, certain non-digital societal trends warrant consideration, such as the increasing competition to get into college and secure a good (or any!) job. These trends motivate youth to put forward their best self in order to compete in what is seen (accurately or inaccurately) as an increasingly winner-take-all society. At the same time, the influence of new media technologies on the packaged self is readily apparent. Consider our previous discussion of the glammed-up and rose-colored identities that young people present online. Digital media give youth the time and tools to craft an attractive identity, as well as an audience to view and respond to it.

Facebook and other social network sites emphasize self-presentation by organizing their sites around users' individual profiles. The standard elements of a profile on Facebook—friend list, profile picture, inventories of personal tastes and activities—are used to package the self for public consumption. Presentation and performance are also central on YouTube, where users become the stars of their own video channels. A few of them—including Justin Bieber, a teen heartthrob whom many adolescent girls would like to “marry”—have earned widespread celebrity for their homemade videos, offering others the misleading promise that anyone with a camera and Internet access can achieve similar renown. The discourse of fame surrounding new media technologies like YouTube parallels the growing emphasis on individualistic values that researchers have observed in tween-focused TV shows.
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Indeed, they point out that many of these shows engage youth across a variety of media platforms, encouraging their participation by holding out the promise that they, too, can become stars like their favorite TV personalities. Perhaps one needs to add to Erikson's ensemble of possible outcomes of the fifth life crisis a new category: “implausible identity.”

The educators of low-income youth were particularly concerned about the impact of reality TV on their students. One educator observed that young people increasingly find their role models on MTV rather than in their family or their neighborhood. These television personalities embody a glamorous, self-centered lifestyle that demands little effort or concern for matters beyond their personal and immediate satisfaction.
Several participants pointed to such cultural influences to explain one educator's observation: “Many of our students, even though they aspire to other things, if they could, they would rather be someone in the entertainment industry, or a sports figure.” This view is supported by published research indicating that many teens would rather be the personal assistant to a celebrity than to be themselves a prominent executive, author, or researcher.
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The desire for a celebrity connection is particularly widespread among unpopular kids and kids with low self-esteem.

Apps also prove instructive in contemplating the rise of the packaged self. Individualism and self-focus are evident in the vast marketplace of apps, which gives youth endless opportunity to personalize their digital experience according to their (at least seemingly) distinct combination of interests, habits, and social connections. Just as no two snowflakes are alike, the same could be said (or claimed) of the array of apps on a person's cell phone. Indeed, the app icon itself is worthy of note. One could argue that the icon serves less to signify the purpose of an app and more to represent a particular brand and the lifestyle, values, and general cachet associated with it. In other words, part of an app's appeal lies in its external representation rather than its internal functionality.

Packaging oneself for others involves an element of performance. An app that gained considerable popularity among teens in 2012 illustrates this performative aspect of identity in a digital age. Snapchat lets users take pictures and short videos with their phone (or other mobile device), add text
or drawings, and send them to a fellow Snapchat user for a specified length of time (up to ten seconds) before poof! they vanish magically. After considerable cajoling in 2012, Molly convinced Katie to download Snapchat. Something that stood out immediately for Katie was the stagecraft involved in each Snapchat message that Molly sent to her. A typical message might include a “selfie” of Molly making a funny face, overlaid with a wry comment about a thought she just had. Katie concluded that Snapchat exchanges are not so much a conversation between two people, as with standard text messages, but rather a series of mini-performances for an audience of one.

In addition to its carefully crafted, packaged, performative quality, the externalized self also lends itself to measurement and quantification—increasingly an imperative in today's market-driven, big data societies. Sites like Klout and PeerIndex create “influence scores” for users based on the number of followers or friends they have on social networking and microblogging sites (those with high influence scores can even earn rewards and discounts from companies). Examples of other self-tracking tools include Moodscope, to measure, share, and track one's changing moods; 80Bites, to monitor the number of bites of food one takes each day; and Daily Deeds, to keep track of beneficial habits. Timehop and Rewind.me are two apps that function as memory surrogates by mining your social media data to show you what you tweeted or tumbled in years past. A list of more than five hundred such tools can be found on the primary website of the Quantified Self (QS) movement, a large and growing collection of people from all
parts of the world who use and create tools for self-tracking. In addition to exchanging ideas online, QS enthusiasts also gather for an annual Quantified Self conference and regular in-person meetings in dozens of cities across the globe.

One psychologist expressed concern about young persons' constant self-projection and self-tracking online, which she says leaves them with little time for private contemplation or identity construction. She worries that, as a result, the prominence of their internal sense of self (in Riesman's term, “inner-directedness”) is dwindling, perhaps to the point of nonexistence.

This lament about the lack of time for quiet reflection has become a common theme among academics and the popular press. Researchers have identified a number of benefits that accrue when a brain is at rest (relatively speaking) and focused inward.
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The downtime appears to play a restorative role, promoting feelings of well-being and, ultimately, helping individuals to focus their attention more effectively when it's needed. Daydreaming, wandering, and wondering have positive facets. Introspection may be particularly important for young people who are actively figuring out who and what they want to be. Without time and space to ponder alternative ways of being in the world—without breaking away from an app-determined life path—young persons risk prematurely foreclosing their identities, making it less likely that they will achieve a fully realized and personally fulfilling sense of self.
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Technology was intended to free up time for unstructured
contemplation, but paradoxically it seems to have had the opposite effect.
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Moments where we once sat alone with our thoughts, either waiting for an appointment in the doctor's office or commuting to work on the train or walking the dog, have now been replaced by virtually compulsory listening to music, text messaging, or playing games on our digital devices. Far too often, we do these things all at once. We tweet about events as we experience them, reply to one person's email while talking to another, and, particularly popular among youth, juggle multiple text and instant message conversations simultaneously. Epitomizing the purpose of the app, we're more focused on
doing
than on
being.
One psychologist we interviewed commented that because young people are inclined toward constant virtual connection with others, they don't allow themselves the time and space to figure out their thoughts and desires; they are, consequently, “rendered insecure” by lack of self-knowledge.

Several participants echoed another hot topic of debate among the digerati and mainstream media commentators when they questioned explicitly whether young people's digital lives are making them narcissistic. Katie remembers wondering the same thing when Molly first joined Facebook. Using her cell phone or Photo Booth on her MacBook, Molly seemed to be forever posing for an endless stream of self-portraits, or “selfies,” which she then posted to Facebook (or at least the most flattering shots). In this vein one educator we interviewed commented: “Facebook and texting, though, it's
constant validation. As soon as somebody buzzes you on your phone it's like ‘somebody is paying attention to me.' Facebook, ‘oh, I got fifty likes on that stupid picture I put up there, I guess people are paying attention to me.' I mean it's so narcissistic, and I'm not saying that [kids] were less narcissistic [before the Internet], there are just more ways to be validated now with that.”

The question of the Internet's impact on self-focus has also become a popular focus among social scientists, who've generally observed a positive connection between narcissism and online behavior.
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For instance, one study found that people with high narcissism scores were more likely to post self-promoting content and engage in high levels of social activity on Facebook.
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Another found that college students with high narcissism scores were more likely to tweet about themselves.
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The authors of this study caution that while youth's online behavior may appear narcissistic to an outsider's eye, it's important to keep in mind that their primary motivation for going online may well be not to promote themselves but rather to maintain and nurture their social ties. (We'll examine the social dimension of youth's online lives in the next chapter.) Still, it's worth noting that about 30 to 40 percent of ordinary conversation consists of people talking about themselves, whereas around 80 percent of social media updates are self-focused.
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Also important is the fact that we can't determine in which direction the arrow of causality points. Does Internet use cause narcissism, or do narcissistic people use the Internet in distinctive ways?

Given the self-focus of narcissists, one might assume that they're self-assured and unaffected by the goings-on of others. This turns out not to be the case. As Sherry Turkle explains in her book
Alone Together,
“In the psychoanalytic tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support.”
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Instead of self-assuredness, then, narcissists tend more toward a fragile self that needs propping up by external reassurances. Jean Twenge's research bears this out. Along with rising levels of narcissism among youth, she finds increasing moodiness, restlessness, worry, sadness, and feelings of isolation. In sharp contrast to Riesman's inner-directed persons, today's young people are also more likely to feel that their lives are controlled by external social forces rather than growing out of an internal locus of control. Consistent with Twenge's findings, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles found that the percentage of first-year college students who said that they frequently felt “overwhelmed by all I had to do” during their senior year of high school increased from 18 percent in 1985 to 30 percent in 2012.
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Several of our participants identified a similar incongruity between youth's external polish and their internal insecurities. The camp directors we interviewed told us that campers today demonstrate more self-confidence in what they
say
they can do but are less willing to
test
their abilities through action. They attributed this shift to youth's growing distaste
for taking any tangible risk that could end in failure—failure that once might have been witnessed by a few peers and then forgotten but today might become part of one's permanent digital footprint.