The App Generation
How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply—some would say totally—involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era. Gardner and Davis are concerned with three vital areas of adolescent life: identity, intimacy, and imagination. Through innovative research, including interviews of young people, focus groups of those who work with them, and a unique comparison of youthful artistic productions before and after the digital revolution, the authors uncover the drawbacks of apps: they may foreclose a sense of identity, encourage superficial relations with others, and stunt creative imagination. On the other hand, the benefits of apps are equally striking: they can promote a strong sense of identity, allow deep relationships, and stimulate creativity. The challenge is to venture beyond the ways that apps are designed to be used, Gardner and Davis conclude, and they suggest how the power of apps can be a springboard to greater creativity and higher aspirations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to Harvard psychologist Gardner and University of Washington digital media expert Davis, we should worry when apps become shortcuts for critical thinking and questioning. This book's argument is really an unequivocal condemnation of standardization in learning: "There is much talk about twenty-first century skills the four Cs' of critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and community. On the other hand, almost all educators... call for the kind of constrained curriculum and traditional standard tests that at their best capture skills of a bygone era." On its face, however, the book is a look into a great social experiment. Most of the research here is observational and anecdotal focus groups, interviews, and a review of student artworks and stories from a 20-year period. The authors find correlations between the rise of digital technologies and more individualistic values in television or increasing complexity in student artwork, for example. However, correlations are not causations, as the authors readily admit. Are members of the so-called App Generation risk averse because of their devices, or because of 9/11 and the stock market crash? More provocative than conclusive, the book provides useful frameworks for further research.
