The App Generation Read Free Page A

reconstructed based on notes we’ve taken.
    In formal work, guided by protocols, we’ve conducted systematic interviews with approximately 150 young people living in the New England area and a smaller sample in Bermuda. The New England interviews were conducted between 2008 and 2010 as part of a project examining the ethical dimensions of young people’s digital media activities. For this project, we spoke with youth spanning middle schoolers up to recent college graduates about their experiences with digital media, including any “thorny” situations they’d encountered online. We also interviewed twenty girls who had been blogging throughout their middle and high school years in an online journaling community called LiveJournal. The remaining youth interviews were conducted in Bermuda with students ranging from the eighth through twelfth grades. In our interviews, we have secured much information about how young people think of digital media, how they make use of them, and what they see as the advantages and the limitations of the panoply of devices at their fingertips.
    To supplement our studies with young people, we have carried out an ambitious, complementary program of research with knowledgeable adults. We constituted seven focus groups, each composed of six to ten adults who had worked with young people over at least a twenty-year period—spanning the predigital to the hyperdigital era. Each focus group assembled adults who had a particular form of contact with young people. Specifically, there were focus groups composed of psychoanalysts; psychologists and other mental health workers; camp directors and longtime counselors; religious leaders; arts educators; and classroom teachers and after-school educators who worked primarily with youth living in low-income neighborhoods. In addition, we carried out forty interviews, many extending over two hours, with high school teachers who had worked with young people over at least two decades. Each focus group and interview was recorded, documented, and analyzed.
    Last, in what we believe is a unique line of research, we have compared the artistic productions of young people gathered over a twenty-year period using depositories of student work that had been accumulated continuously throughout the two decades. We chose to look at two bodies of work—student writing and student graphic productions—and discern how the work changed over this period. Our findings, detailed in our discussion of the imaginative powers of young people, revealed the importance of the particular medium of expression chosen by the young artists.
    So much for our methods: technical details are provided inthe appendix. Another downside of most current discussions of young people is that they are lamentably anachronistic—that is, they lack careful attention to the various contexts within which a discussion of today’s young people needs to be considered.
    Accordingly, in the next chapters, we provide two disciplinary contexts within which to locate the young people of today. The first context is
technological.
If we are to claim that the youth of today are defined by the technologies they favor, we need to consider how, in earlier times, technologies—ranging from hand tools to telephones—may have affected or even defined human beings, human nature, and human consciousness. This discussion invites us to distinguish among tools, machines, and the information-rich media of the past century and to consider how digital media may represent a quantum leap in power and influence.
    The second context is deliberately interdisciplinary. We ask, “What do we mean when we speak of a generation?” For most of human history, generations have been defined biologically—the time from an individual’s birth to when that individual becomes (or could become) a parent. In recent centuries, generations have been increasingly defined by sociological