Book Review: The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World, by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis

Abstract

The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 244 pp. $15 pbk.Using applications (apps) can be as easy as 1, 2, and 3. People find an app, download it, and press its icon to use it. Due to the availability of technology, people, especially young people, are easily and quickly adopting digital media into their daily lives. However, does this mean young people's interactions with digital media technologies can be easily explained? The App Generation illustrates that the answer is not as easy as 1, 2, and 3 because young people have a complicated relationship with these technologies.Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Katie Davis is an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School and an advisory board member of MTV's digital abuse campaign, A Thin Line. Using multiple methods, such as interviews, focus groups, and observations of creative productions, the authors' main purpose was to find out whether today's young people are using apps to explore and create possibilities (app enabling) or are restricted by apps (app dependent).The book consists of seven chapters. In Chapters 1 through 3, the authors explain their motives, historical backgrounds of media technologies, and definitions of a generation. One major motivation for this book comes from Molly, Davis's younger sister. From discussing how Molly and her peers regularly use social media to create superficial relationships, such as Facebook marriages, the authors identified that young people's identity, intimacy, and imagination (the Three Is) are recurring themes in digital media's impact on human psychology. To explain how technologies affect people, the authors reference Marshall McLuhan and the inventions of the Gutenberg press, television, and computers to demonstrate how technologies became personal and full of activities as people gained more control to circulate content. Because digital media technologies offer new ways for young people to participate online, the authors explain that these technologies are the keys that shape today's generation called the App Generation.Chapters 4 through 6 tackle the Three Is and demonstrate how the App Generation is developing differently. The authors note that members of the App Generation are strategically constructing their identities because they are highly aware of privacy settings to display only what they want to show in their online presentations. These self-packaged selves show that the App Generation seems to focus on developing their external selves instead of their internal selves. For intimacy, the authors indicate that the App Generation's interpersonal relationships are negatively affected. For example, Facebook has discouraged young people from forming intimate relationships because people can immediately cancel plans and write quick updates instead of having personal interactions. Moreover, they are also unable to make deeper connections because they utilize technologies, such as Skype, to talk to others through a camera instead of looking at their eyes. …