The App Generation

The App Generation

***WARNING: This week’s post contains some adult themes and topics***

            The App Generation is a very insightful look at how today’s youth are immersed in a digital world where the gateways for connection to information and other people have never been more wide-open and what that means for a generation that’s growing up in an app connected world. Their lives, relationships, and how they think differ greatly in application than those of us who grew up in the pre-digital era.

            After reading ‘The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World’ I came across this article from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161201-the-sex-workers-selling-access-to-their-real-lives. The article details how webcam models are selling access to their private lives by selling access to their Snapchat accounts, as well as KIK and other social media websites. They’re not just selling their nakedness, but also a peek into their daily routines and real lives, albeit the best curated content, not unlike the ‘best-selves’ we portray on Facebook and other social media. It also states “…there is no longer anything unusual about conducting intimate relationships online. Daniel Miller at University College London, who studies the impact of webcams on human interactions, takes it as given that video-based interactions carried out over the internet can be as intimate as face-to-face human contact – and perhaps more so. “It’s entirely possible that Snapchat allows a form of intimacy that other methods don’t allow,” he says.”

            I thought article fit well with the chapter ‘Apps and Intimate Relationships’ especially this book quote about how apps are shortcuts “These shortcuts make interacting with others much quicker, easier, and less risky…such conveniences can certainly enable meaningful relations and, at their best, strengthen and deepen personal bonds.” (Emphasis added). The chapter also covers the ‘hook-up’ culture of today’s youth who would rather go through a series of causal sexual relationships than to open themselves up to risk an intimate committed relationship. Might these webcam models who are selling access to their ‘personal’ lives be filling an intimacy void to those who seek out these sexually gratifying online interactions? One thing is for sure, our online connected world is changing how we interact with others.

            The next article I came across on the same BBC site was: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161129-the-new-words-that-reveal-how-tech-has-changed-us. I think this article goes along with the chapter ‘Personal Identity in the Age of the App’ as it covers how we are now coming up with words to describe our addictions to our smartphones. Even in the lighthearted defining of our smartphone usage we can identify with the “bowed head tribe”. This digital age can blur the lines between our online and offline identities or it can sharply contrast our online selves with our real selves and our youth are taking comfort in the safety of an externalized, packaged identity. Our youth, or digital natives, are immersed in all forms of digital connection and of ways of putting themselves ‘out there.’ They know not of a time when face to face interactions were the dominate way of how we navigated our world.

            In the chapter Acts (and Apps) of Imagination the authors expand upon how our youth find creative ways to express themselves in the confines of our technologies, much like the early users of the telegraph soon found many more uses for the telegraph than the creators intended, our youth are always pushing the creative boundaries of what an app was originally created for. Imaginations, they contend, are more likely to be facilitated with more efficient ways to communicate them, and as we’ve come to know our current culture is as connected of a world as there has been.

            As I read about this current app generation and think of how my students navigate their own identities, intimacies, and imaginations I must take careful consideration of whether they are an app-dependent or and app-enabled population. I must craft my teaching designs to help them be app-enabled where they are using the available technologies to broaden their possibilities as it relates to helping them finding their place in the world. I must mindfully craft an environment in my classroom that considers the differences of the app generation from the pre-digital ones and enable my students to express themselves in ways that are uniquely theirs.

P.S. I do not endorse those who take part in the world’s oldest occupation. I merely found the article relevant to the book in the fact that our growing digital world is changing the way some may define intimacy.