The App Generation Read Free Page B

considerations. The defining characteristics of a generation echo the dominant events of the time, be they military (the Great War), political (the assassination of a leader), economic (the Great Depression), or cultural (the Lost Generation of the 1920s, the Beat Generation of the 1950s). We propose that, going forward, generations may be defined by their dominanttechnologies, with the length of the generation dependent on the longevity of a particular technological innovation.
    Throughout our discussion, we keep our eyes on how young people have acted—as well as how they have been characterized and defined by their elders. At the same time, we maintain a sharp focus on the events of the past half century—specifically, the events that defined the spaces in which Howard, Katie, and Molly have each grown up and have helped to fashion the identity, intimacy, and imagination of the three of us, and of our peer groups. As it happens, two books published in 1950—
The Lonely Crowd,
by the sociologist David Riesman and his colleagues, and
Childhood and Society,
by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson—provide apt contexts for this transgenerational comparison.
    In such a wide-ranging undertaking, with both empirical variety and disciplinary reach, we (as well as our readers) welcome a viable and dependable throughline. This throughline is provided by our characterization of today’s young people as the App Generation. Whether we are unpacking the technological or generational contexts, or reviewing our various empirical studies, we focus on how the availability, proliferation, and power of apps mark the young persons of our time as different and special—indeed, how their consciousness is formed by immersion in a sea of apps. Fittingly, in the concluding chapter, we consider the effect of an “app milieu” on a range of human activities and aspirations. More grandly, we ponder the questions, “What might life in an ‘app world’ signal for the future of the species and the planet?”

TWO
Talk about Technology
    T HE FIRST TECHNOLOGIES ARE built into our species’ hardware and software. Stroke the side of a newborn’s foot and the toes will spread; make a sudden loud sound and the infant will startle; smile at a three-month-old and the baby will smile back. No instruction is necessary.
    Externally invented technologies have been with us for many thousands of years, and they are equally a part of human development. One can tickle with a brush as well as with the hand; the loud sound can come from a percussion instrument or a foghorn; and the infant can smile at a doll or a mobile. Nor need the young child be a passive reactor. Within the first year or so of life, the child can shake a rattle, search for a hidden phone, even drag a computer mouse and behold an object skipping across a screen . . . or, in the manner of the only slightly fanciful cartoon reproduced here, transfer funds from one account to another.
    Whether part of each of our bodies, or devised by human hands over the years, technologies provide a principal means by which we carry out actions from the time of birth to the time of death—or at least until senescence appears. Many of our greatest human achievements are due to technologies devised by humans—think of clocks, the spinning wheel, the steam engine, rocket ships. Many of our most frightening achievements are also due to technologies devised by human beings—think of bows and arrows, rifles, nuclear weapons, rocket ships (again), or, most recently, the drones with which battles in remote sites are increasingly being waged.

    Michael Maslin / The New Yorker Collection.
FOUR SPHERES TO KEEP IN MIND
    In our focus on apps, we are examining a preeminent technology of our time. But in discussing apps and “The App Generation,” we will inevitably touch on four different perspectives or spheres, each with its own terminology and vocabulary. These