Week 13 - The App Generation

I really enjoyed Howard Gardner's book The App Generation. I read it during breaks at work, stopping to highlight passages I thought were important, and I found myself highlighting quite a bit. Gardner's ideas about this young generation's unique characteristics, skills, challenges and habits really resonated with me. There is so much discussion right now about what the app world is doing to our attention, biases, habits, social interactions and relationships. This world is new, and we're just figuring it out. Some of what he described I could relate to; some I had observed in my own students and even in my peers.


Some of this stuff mirrors what I'd read in other books on similar subjects. One great book in the same vein is comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance. If you haven't read this book yet, I can't recommend it enough. Not only is it filled with Ansari's lovable charm and hilarious wit, but he wrote it with sociologist Eric Klinenberg, so it's backed up with tons of real research. Modern Romance focuses on older millennials more than their younger siblings, but you'll see a lot of similarities with Gardner's observations. I found quite a few parallels in what Ansari says about dating in the app world and the ideas about intimacy in Gardner's book. Ansari discusses, with the help of survey data, graphics, screen grabs of actual dating app profiles, and excerpts from actual text message conversations, the perils and pleasures of dating in the app century.

Now as I said, we're still figuring out how to navigate the app-dependent (and enabled) world we live in, and we're still learning about its effects. Gardner suggests that we may never know some of the effects of apps on our youth. He says this is because we don't have a control group for the mass experiment it would require:

We can never prove that these features are a direct or even a principal consequence of the pervasiveness of technologies of a certain sort. It is simply impossible to carry out the proper experiment with the needed controls. We cannot divide a state, a nation, or the whole planet into two groups; one given free access to all manners of digital technologies, the other group somehow precluded from any access (162).

I drove up to Northeastern Ohio last week to spend the weekend with my mom. As I neared my destination and stopped for gas, I decided that I disagreed with this one of Gardner's statements. We do have a control group, a very good one. You see, the hamlets and towns in Geauga County, south and west of Cleveland are home to the nation's second largest Amish settlements. There live thousands of residents who live without smart phones, without Internet access, without television and presumably, without the reduced attention spans of their "English" peers ("English" is what they call non-Amish). We have an entire generation of kids who exist outside the app world. It occurred to me that we do have the means and resources for an experiment. We could study Amish children at home and at school in order to determine what, if any, are the effects of our media and app saturated world. We could test every one of Gardner's hypotheses about creativity, intimacy and social interaction by comparing the academic and social development inside and outside these communities. I'd like to do some research into whether or not such a study like this has been done. If not, I think there could be a really great opportunity here.