The App Generation (18 page)

Creativity scholars sometimes talk about “Big C” and “little c” creativity. The former consists of the truly ground-breaking, original works of art that can change a domain permanently: Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring,
Pablo Picasso's
Desmoiselles d'Avignon,
Martha Graham's
Frontier
. By contrast, “little c” creativity inheres in the realm of daily problem-solving and adaptation to change.
³⁴
Our investigations lead us to conjecture that digital media give rise to—and allow more people to engage in—a “middle c” creativity that is more interesting and impressive than “little c” but—due to built-in software constraints and obstacles to deep engagement—decidedly less ground-breaking than “Big C.” These studies also suggest that digital media may have a freeing effect on those young people who already have a disposition to experiment, to imagine, while having a freezing impact on that increasing proportion of youth who would rather follow the line of least resistance.

As we saw in our considerations of identity and intimacy, the digital media do not (at least yet) fully determine how young people think and act. In each case, one can describe scenarios in which the App Generation lapses into a comfortable state of app dependence, as well as a happier scenario in which apps enable youth to have a deeper and more rounded sense of self as well as more fully developed intimate relations with others. With respect to artistic activities, the picture turns out to be even more complex. In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan,
we've described how imagination with respect to one medium (graphic expression) is more likely to be enhanced than imagination with respect to another medium (literary expression). When it comes to the matter of creativity, the medium matters. We've noted as well that imagination is likely to be facilitated by the greater ease of communication with others, far as well as near, and by the often powerful vocational and cultural signals in the surrounding community. In our final pages we ponder how these complex factors may be changing the fundamental nature of human society and human consciousness.

“Civilization advances by extending the
number of important operations which we can
perform without thinking about them.”

—Alfred North Whitehead

The British writer Anthony Burgess is probably best known for his 1962 novel
A Clockwork Orange,
adapted a decade later (1971) into a memorable movie by director Stanley Kubrick—a work that has in the years since morphed into a cult classic.
¹
Briefly, the novel portrays a young ruffian, Alex, who participates all too eagerly in mayhem, rape, and even murder. As Burgess puts it, Alex is generously “endowed, perhaps over-endowed, with three characteristics that we regard as essential attributes of man.”
²
To specify: Alex is very articulate; he loves beauty, especially the music of Beethoven; and he revels in violence, specializing in terrorizing urban streets at night.

In an effort to rehabilitate Alex, the state authorizes a form of “aversion therapy.” In the course of this two-week regimen, Alex is injected with drugs that compel him to associate violence with extreme nausea. In short order he is transformed into a peaceful if somewhat boring member of the community—in Burgess's phrase, “he is forced to walk a tightrope of imposed ‘goodness.'” Reflecting on his book some years later, Burgess put forth his own belief that “it is better to be bad of one's own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing.”
³

Burgess considered his short novel to be part of the tradition of literary and scientific utopias and dystopias. In Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World,
individuals are deliberately bred—fertilized and conditioned in early life—to become acquiescent members of preordained social classes.
⁴
In George Orwell's
1984,
the totalitarian state attempts complete brainwashing of its inhabitants, with Winston Smith waging a lonely battle to escape the political clutches of the state.
⁵
And in a book published at the same time as Kubrick's movie appeared, B. F. Skinner (the poster-child behaviorist-psychologist introduced earlier) described the supposedly benevolent effects of growing up in a society in which human action was completely controlled by a regimen of reinforcement (in lay language, rewards and, more rarely, punishments) of specific actions.
⁶

Burgess spurns all such “totalistic” visions, whether they be put forth as utopian or dystopian. As he puts it, “There are few of us who do not reject outright both the Orwellian and the Huxleian nightmares. In a sense we would prefer the
repressive society, full of secret police and barbed wire, to the scientifically conditioned one, in which being happy means doing the right thing.” Indeed, he says, “enforced conditioning of a mind, however good the social intention, has to be evil.”
⁷

As a British literary intellectual, critical of technological “fixes,” Burgess would likely feel at ease with the world of
L'Éducation sentimentale,
portrayed a century earlier by Gustave Flaubert.
⁸
While scarcely a backward part of the world—indeed, for many, the Paris of 1850 represented the Apogee of Civilization—there were few signs of advanced technology or media in the milieu of Frédéric Moreau. Frédéric and his circle of friends lived in a world made up of books, pictures, and artistic performances; of stocks, money, and contracts; of gossip, flirtations, and rivalries; of ambitions, achievements, and disappointments. No radio, movies, television, let alone computers, genetic manipulations, pharmacological or electrophysiological conditioning. Flaubert did not engage in a philosophical debate about freedom versus free will, though this is clearly a topic that Frédéric Moreau's circle could have debated eagerly. (As we've noted, they gloried in the ancient art of conversation.) But to many readers, Flaubert's overall message is clear enough: life at twenty is filled with hopes and dreams, while the succeeding years usher in a whittling down of possibilities, regrets of missed opportunities, and poignant memories of things past. Similarly stifling messages permeate Flaubert's other writings, most notably in the portrait of Madame Bovary, the beautiful and zestful provincial wife whose
ill-considered liaisons led, seemingly ineluctably, to her sad demise.

But that was France, clearly part of Old Europe. What about the ambience in the wilder parts of the world, specifically the United States as it grew from a garland of colonies in the mid-eighteenth century to a political, economic, and military powerhouse two centuries later?

We receive important clues from the writings of literate Europeans who visited the shores of North America over the centuries.
⁹
What struck these observers—and we authors seized the opportunity to review their principal writings!—was the pragmatism of Americans; their capacity to put their nose to the grindstone and get something done; their pride in the laws and the political process in their country; in contrast, their ignorance and suspicion of foreign (especially traditional European) society; their discomfort with high art, culture, philosophy; and—it needs to be underscored—their abiding faith in invention, technique, and technology. One encounters little of the air of regret, of roads not taken, that permeates the Flaubertian universe. In their twentieth-century writings, the Canadian Marshall McLuhan and the Frenchman Jacques Ellul did not have to refer specifically to the United States when they alluded to the powers of media and technology, but there is little doubt that they considered the United States a bellwether of what was likely to emerge around the globe. If the world were going to be fundamentally altered by technology, more likely in a dystopian direction, that transformation was likely to take place initially in the United States.

Anthony Burgess might have been disappointed. In the “app world” described in the preceding chapters there has been no active planning agent—no Mustapha Mond, World Controller in the post–Henry Ford
Brave New World,
no Big Brother of
1984,
no T. E. Frazier, the neo-Thoreauvian architect of Skinner's utopian
Walden Two.
Those scientists and technologists and entrepreneurs who created the hardware and software of the second half of the twentieth century—in the aspiring Silicon Valleys scattered across the earth's surface—cannot reasonably be accused of attempting to fashion, let alone control, all subsequent human behavior. In fact, these digital pioneers were motivated by disparate considerations: sheer scientific curiosity; the search for monetary rewards; the effort to determine the extent to which computers could mimic (or surpass) human intellect in pursuits ranging from the prediction of climate to victory at chess, backgammon, or go; the hope of making human activities easier and more enjoyable to carry out, and, latterly, by the enigma of whether digital ware and neural ware (silicon and synapses) could actually merge. The same mix of motives (commerce, competition, curiosity, consolidation) can be marshaled, more or less, with respect to the intervention of earlier technologies, like the cotton gin or the steam engine, and earlier media, like the telegraph and the radio.

Today we are closer to “being there.” It is becoming possible for virtually all of our habits to be initiated and become
entrenched, courtesy of our daily (if not moment-to-moment) uses of digital technology; it is becoming possible for us to feel good about this situation. And some of us do. Indeed, the current American interest in “happiness”—and, again, it seems to be an especially American obsession—may reflect a belief that it should be possible all the time to feel positive, to avoid problems, disasters, conflicts, even challenges on which we might fall short.
¹⁰
(Note: If only success is possible, such challenges do not live up to their name.)

So how to describe the actual state of affairs? And how do we, the authors—as designated synthesizers—feel about the situation? Without doubt, Technology (the capitalization is deliberate) is a larger part of our lives, from earlier in life, than ever before in human history. The technologies are varied—and this is good—but the strongest influence, particularly among the young, is the pervasiveness of the “app”—the activation of a procedure that allows one to achieve a goal as expeditiously as possible and enjoyably as well. At present, life is certainly more than the sum of apps at our disposal. But the influence of apps is more pervasive and, we believe, potentially more pernicious. And that is because the breadth and the accessibility of apps inculcates an app consciousness, an app worldview: the idea that there are defined ways to achieve whatever we want to achieve, if we are fortunate enough to have the right ensemble of apps, and, at a more macroscopic level, access to the “super-app” for living a certain life, presented to the rest of the world in a certain way. To indulge for
a moment in the lowest form of humor: Could just the right ensemble of apps lead to a wholly hAPPy life?

In the preceding chapters, we have spelled out how the app worldview shapes and perhaps constrains the ways in which the chief challenges of youth and early adulthood are negotiated. With respect to identity, there is pressure to present oneself as an impressive, desirable kind of person and to make sure that all signs (and postings) confirm that perhaps precociously crystallized sense of identity. Similarly, with respect to intimacy, the capacity to announce—indeed, to define—one's connections to other persons may preclude fuller exploration, with its heightened vulnerability but also with greater potential for deep and continually evolving relations with truly significant others. Finally, and on a more positive note, with respect to imagination and creativity, digital technologies afford enormous potential for individual or group breakthroughs—provided that the existing apps are treated as approaches to be built upon (allowing us to be app-enabled), rather than ones that constrict or constrain one's means and one's goals (causing us to become app-dependent).

Once again: It's important to bear in mind that our portrait is based on, and applies primarily to middle-class and upper-middle-class youth living in an affluent, developed society. (These represent the same populations that were portrayed by Erik Erikson and David Riesman seventy years ago.) In our research we did not focus on working-class youth, nor on those seen as disadvantaged in terms of economic, social, or
demographic variables. That said, and somewhat to our surprise, our informants described much the same story at work in all sectors of society. Teachers described the same tethering to technology, the same hesitation (for the most part) to take risks, the same efforts to create an idealized digital representation of self. Parents of disadvantaged youth were seen as protecting their offspring from challenges or obstacles—and, at considerable sacrifice, making sure that their children had access at all times to smart devices. As anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has pointed out, if your life has more difficulties, it can either challenge you to create new opportunities for yourself or induce you to revert to quick fixes, be they narcotics or never-ending computer games.
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To be sure: Even if our description of today's young people has hit the mark, 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. (Statements about the effects of any technology—from guns to television—suffer from the same limitation; in a democratic society, one cannot legislate the gold standard of randomized assignment to experimental groups.) And so, in the manner of a persuasive lawyer, indeed a good advocate more generally, the most that we can do is to marshal the relevant arguments,
building up the strongest case for the state of affairs that we've observed and the likely reasons for its existence.