The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World, by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis
Any book featuring the phrase “today’s youth” in the subtitle immediately has me on edge. It conjures up a generation gap, “tune in, turn on, drop out” and brown acid. Updating this story, we enter a world of Miley Cyrus’ piercings, twerking and tongue aerobics.
The embrace between “youth” and “technology” is as unstable as a soap opera romance. Understanding the sociology of digitisation – who uses particular software and hardware and why – requires much more research than simply assuming that “the young people” have Bluetooth connectivity between their mobile phone and their mastoid.
Howard Gardner (professor of cognition and education at Harvard University) and Katie Davis (assistant professor in the University of Washington’s Information School) have been seduced by the digital dance between youth and technology. This co-authored book sees them entering the Clay Shirky zone of easy answers to difficult questions.
Read full review… especially worth the last comment comparing the book to ‘digital tweaking’.
