Read Online The App Generation by Howard Gardner, Katie Davis - Free Book Online
Authors: Howard Gardner, Katie Davis
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one is led, perhaps ineluctably, to the following conclusion: What we think, say, do, and dream for ourselves, and how we relate to others, are most perspicuously thought of as apps, whether we are thinking about what to do in the next minute, in the next day, orâin super-app fashionâfor the rest of our lives.
While Howard was viewing the Promised Digital Land from afar, Katie, growing up three decades later, saw it much closerâand Molly was thrust right in the middle of it, withlittle sense of what it was like to live in a time permeated by mass media but innocent of digital hegemony.
KATIE â S AND MOLLY â S UNIVERSES
Katieâs youth in the 1980s and early 1990s took place amid the ever-shrinking and increasingly popular personal computer; the rise of cable television, along with the 24/7 news cycle and reality TV shows it spawned; the gradual decline of pay phones and landlines and their replacement by mobile phones; and, most memorably for Katie, the introduction of the World Wide Web, version 1.0.
As a result of growing up on a small island and in a household with a tight budget, Katieâs experience of these trends lagged behind many of her American counterparts. The âbig threeâ television networks reigned supreme throughout her childhood and most of her adolescence. Much as Walter Cronkite had done for Howard and his peers, CBS news anchor Dan Rather informed Katie about the
Challenger
crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student protests in Tiananmen Square, and the alarming spread of AIDS in the United States.
Things had started to change by the time the first Gulf War started (and ended) in 1991. Notably, Katieâs father and stepmother had gotten cable TV installed in their house. Every Sunday and Wednesday when Katie visited, the three of them watched raptly as Operation Desert Storm unfolded in real time on CNN.
CNN was still the go-to source of round-the-clock news coverage when the Twin Towers fell ten years later. Molly was only five in 2001, but her memories of the event are vivid. Even though she was in a different country and many miles away, the 24/7 news cycle (and her motherâs journalistic background and penchant for the news) made it difficult to escape the images and sounds from the tragedy and its aftermath.
Keeping track ofâand increasingly contributing toâthe news continued to change at warp speed throughout the opening decade of the new millennium. In 2006, Myspace helped students organize a massive, nationwide protest against proposed immigration legislation. Later that year, Saddam Husseinâs execution was caught on a mobile phone, and within hours the video was posted on the Internet. The 2008 presidential election was widely dubbed the Facebook Election, the candidates having learned from Howard Deanâs successful use of social media to raise awareness and money for his 2004 presidential campaign. And a mere five years after its inception, Twitter was famously used by protesters and journalists during the Arab Spring in 2011.
These digital media contributed to Mollyâs growing consciousness of the world outside of Bermuda. Compared to Katieâs youth, her experiences of this wider world and the events therein have been more vivid, immediate, and interactive.
Like most kids her age, Molly is more likely to use her digital devices to participate and keep track of pop culture than to follow political events as they unfold. Throughout her childhood, reality television has represented a large slice of herpop culture diet. Though it reached a critical mass only in the twenty-first century, reality TV traces its roots at least as far back as the 1992 debut of
The Real World,
MTVâs landmark reality series about a group of twenty-somethings living together under one roof. Lacking regular access to cable in the 1990s, Katie never watched the show during her youth, but she and Molly recently came across the first
While Howard was viewing the Promised Digital Land from afar, Katie, growing up three decades later, saw it much closerâand Molly was thrust right in the middle of it, withlittle sense of what it was like to live in a time permeated by mass media but innocent of digital hegemony.
KATIE â S AND MOLLY â S UNIVERSES
Katieâs youth in the 1980s and early 1990s took place amid the ever-shrinking and increasingly popular personal computer; the rise of cable television, along with the 24/7 news cycle and reality TV shows it spawned; the gradual decline of pay phones and landlines and their replacement by mobile phones; and, most memorably for Katie, the introduction of the World Wide Web, version 1.0.
As a result of growing up on a small island and in a household with a tight budget, Katieâs experience of these trends lagged behind many of her American counterparts. The âbig threeâ television networks reigned supreme throughout her childhood and most of her adolescence. Much as Walter Cronkite had done for Howard and his peers, CBS news anchor Dan Rather informed Katie about the
Challenger
crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student protests in Tiananmen Square, and the alarming spread of AIDS in the United States.
Things had started to change by the time the first Gulf War started (and ended) in 1991. Notably, Katieâs father and stepmother had gotten cable TV installed in their house. Every Sunday and Wednesday when Katie visited, the three of them watched raptly as Operation Desert Storm unfolded in real time on CNN.
CNN was still the go-to source of round-the-clock news coverage when the Twin Towers fell ten years later. Molly was only five in 2001, but her memories of the event are vivid. Even though she was in a different country and many miles away, the 24/7 news cycle (and her motherâs journalistic background and penchant for the news) made it difficult to escape the images and sounds from the tragedy and its aftermath.
Keeping track ofâand increasingly contributing toâthe news continued to change at warp speed throughout the opening decade of the new millennium. In 2006, Myspace helped students organize a massive, nationwide protest against proposed immigration legislation. Later that year, Saddam Husseinâs execution was caught on a mobile phone, and within hours the video was posted on the Internet. The 2008 presidential election was widely dubbed the Facebook Election, the candidates having learned from Howard Deanâs successful use of social media to raise awareness and money for his 2004 presidential campaign. And a mere five years after its inception, Twitter was famously used by protesters and journalists during the Arab Spring in 2011.
These digital media contributed to Mollyâs growing consciousness of the world outside of Bermuda. Compared to Katieâs youth, her experiences of this wider world and the events therein have been more vivid, immediate, and interactive.
Like most kids her age, Molly is more likely to use her digital devices to participate and keep track of pop culture than to follow political events as they unfold. Throughout her childhood, reality television has represented a large slice of herpop culture diet. Though it reached a critical mass only in the twenty-first century, reality TV traces its roots at least as far back as the 1992 debut of
The Real World,
MTVâs landmark reality series about a group of twenty-somethings living together under one roof. Lacking regular access to cable in the 1990s, Katie never watched the show during her youth, but she and Molly recently came across the first
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