Read Online The App Generation by Howard Gardner, Katie Davis - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Howard Gardner, Katie Davis
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episode of the first season while browsing the television shows on Hulu (Molly watches most of her television on such video-streaming sites). Both sisters were struck by how civil the participants were to each other, as well as by the showâs lack of structure and story arc. This episode stands in stark contrast to its modern incarnation and the scores of other reality series that have sprung up since then. Todayâs shows pivot on high drama, whether itâs competing to be the last survivor on a remote island, the last woman standing in a battle to wed an eligible bachelor, or Americaâs next top model, fashion designer, performer, or chef.
The Internet made it possible for Molly and Katie to watch a 1992 episode of
The Real World
on Mollyâs laptop in 2012. For Molly, that statement is unremarkable because the Internet itself is unremarkable. But for Katie, it still seems a bit magical. After all, she knew nothing of the Internet until 1995, her senior year of high school, when her English teacher took the class on a âfield tripâ downstairs to the school library and introduced them to the World Wide Web. With great fanfare, he opened up a Netscape Navigator browser and typed in the web address for a site dedicated to Shakespeareâs sonnets.The considerably older teacher who co-taught the course took one look at the small font, clashing colors, and pop-up ads and dismissed the whole thing out of hand, saying, âItâll never last.â He pointed out that all of this information was already available in books. He insisted that no one would ever choose to read on a screen instead of in print. He questioned how one could determine the credibility of anything posted on the web.
Needless to say, he was wrong (as wrong as IBMâs CEO Thomas Watson, who had been quoted as predictingâeither in 1943 or in 1958; sources do not agreeâthat there would be need for only five mainframe computers in the world!). 11 The Internet has grown from just sixteen million users worldwide in 1995 to well over two billion in 2012. We can do far more online than anyone imagined in 1995. No longer regarded primarily as a content-delivery system, the Internet is highly dynamic and participatory. The problem of screen-reading is largely resolved (thanks in part to e-reader apps like Kindle and Stanza). Credibility issues remain, but with the likes of the
BBC
and the
New York Times
online, plenty of reputable sites do exist.
As Katie was being introduced to the World Wide Web at school, her mother was eight monthsâ pregnant with her second daughter, who would be born in January 1996 without any knowledge of a pre-Internet world. Whereas Katie didnât get her first email account until her first year of college, her first laptop a year after that, and her first cell phone about eight years after that, Molly has trouble remembering any of these firsts. In this way she resembles the dozens ofyouth whom we studied directly or learned about from our interviews of informed adults. Her struggles around issues of identity, intimacy, and imagination will be played out against a background that could not have been envisioned a half century ago.
Weâve now provided the promised backdrops for our discoveries. To begin, we furnished a lexicon so that we could examine the contributions of media and technology to behaviors and consciousness in earlier eras. Weâve gone back to the traditional biological meaning of âgenerationâ and contrasted that to more recent descriptions in terms of consciousness and technology. Then, drawing on major sociological and psychological studies of America in the first half of the twentieth century and with an eye toward the different worlds in which Howard, Katie, and Molly have grown up, we have contrasted the mass media world in the 1950s with the increasingly dominant digital milieu of recent decades.
Itâs high time for us to look directly at the
The Internet made it possible for Molly and Katie to watch a 1992 episode of
The Real World
on Mollyâs laptop in 2012. For Molly, that statement is unremarkable because the Internet itself is unremarkable. But for Katie, it still seems a bit magical. After all, she knew nothing of the Internet until 1995, her senior year of high school, when her English teacher took the class on a âfield tripâ downstairs to the school library and introduced them to the World Wide Web. With great fanfare, he opened up a Netscape Navigator browser and typed in the web address for a site dedicated to Shakespeareâs sonnets.The considerably older teacher who co-taught the course took one look at the small font, clashing colors, and pop-up ads and dismissed the whole thing out of hand, saying, âItâll never last.â He pointed out that all of this information was already available in books. He insisted that no one would ever choose to read on a screen instead of in print. He questioned how one could determine the credibility of anything posted on the web.
Needless to say, he was wrong (as wrong as IBMâs CEO Thomas Watson, who had been quoted as predictingâeither in 1943 or in 1958; sources do not agreeâthat there would be need for only five mainframe computers in the world!). 11 The Internet has grown from just sixteen million users worldwide in 1995 to well over two billion in 2012. We can do far more online than anyone imagined in 1995. No longer regarded primarily as a content-delivery system, the Internet is highly dynamic and participatory. The problem of screen-reading is largely resolved (thanks in part to e-reader apps like Kindle and Stanza). Credibility issues remain, but with the likes of the
BBC
and the
New York Times
online, plenty of reputable sites do exist.
As Katie was being introduced to the World Wide Web at school, her mother was eight monthsâ pregnant with her second daughter, who would be born in January 1996 without any knowledge of a pre-Internet world. Whereas Katie didnât get her first email account until her first year of college, her first laptop a year after that, and her first cell phone about eight years after that, Molly has trouble remembering any of these firsts. In this way she resembles the dozens ofyouth whom we studied directly or learned about from our interviews of informed adults. Her struggles around issues of identity, intimacy, and imagination will be played out against a background that could not have been envisioned a half century ago.
Weâve now provided the promised backdrops for our discoveries. To begin, we furnished a lexicon so that we could examine the contributions of media and technology to behaviors and consciousness in earlier eras. Weâve gone back to the traditional biological meaning of âgenerationâ and contrasted that to more recent descriptions in terms of consciousness and technology. Then, drawing on major sociological and psychological studies of America in the first half of the twentieth century and with an eye toward the different worlds in which Howard, Katie, and Molly have grown up, we have contrasted the mass media world in the 1950s with the increasingly dominant digital milieu of recent decades.
Itâs high time for us to look directly at the
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