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We may be entering an age of App Consciousness.
Apps are shaping our worldview. Both adults and young people increasingly mediate their lived experience through the apps on their mobile devices. Coauthors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis look at this phenomenon in their new book, “The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World.”
The book emerged out of questions about “how the new digital media were affecting the ethical compass of young users.” It makes the argument “that young people growing up in our time are not only immersed in apps: they’ve come to think of the world as an ensemble of apps, to see their lives as a string of ordered apps, or perhaps, in many cases, a single, extended, cradle-to-grave app.”
Of course, it is not just young people. I’ll admit that my life is often mediated through apps. Social media, for example, is one of the criteria I consider when making everyday choices. And the apps on my Nexus 5 smartphone determine both the structure and the substance of many life-moments I experience and share.
I often ask: How will a photograph of this moment look in my Facebook timeline? Is this a tweetable moment; if not, how can I make it so? My girlfriend and I dressed up in Halloween costumes just long enough to create a post-able snapshot. Sure, we did it with a sense of self-deprecating irony; but still, it was a holiday staged for social media. On a recent trip to Nashville, we were just as extreme, making a game out of tasting (and photographing) as much hot fried chicken as we possibly could. And we located that chicken through both the Google Maps and the Yelp apps.
Both my girlfriend and I have public identities that are constructed through a series of app-enabled status updates. And that is not just because we work in the media. Increasingly, everyone’s personality is becoming a brand.
Of course, there is nothing new about our lives being mediated, and branded, through status updates and demonstrable actions. Psychologists and philosophers were essentially writing about this phenomenon decades before the internet and smart devices even existed. Perhaps the difference is that through social media apps, the performative aspect of our everyday lives becomes explicit.
Generally, I like when we do things more explicitly. Initially, it seems like it goes hand-in-hand with self-awareness and consciousness. But in this case, I’m not sure whether or not we’re conscious of the right things. Certainly our performativity is more explicit, but we’re hardly thoughtful about the fact that our options for personal identity formation are increasingly prefigured by the options presented by Facebook or Twitter–or, by what’s shareable from a smartphone app. Consider Judith Butler’s characterization of performativity as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.”
In other words, we ought to remember that our social media personality “brands” are not necessarily autonomous self-expressions. They can also fortify a particular app’s perspective. Like cattle “branding,” the logos, agendas, and priorities of our corporate ranchers are indelibly burned into the hides of our public identities.
In “The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World,” Gardner and Davis write, “The Apps arrayed on a person’s smartphone or tablet represent a fingerprint of sorts–only instead of a unique pattern of ridges, it’s the combination of interests, habits, and social connections that identify that person.” They continue, “life in an app-suffused society yields not only many small features of a person’s identity but also a push toward an overall packaged sense of self–as it were, an omnibus app.”
All of our experiences are increasingly siloed and funneled into narrow decontextualized categories that are predetermined by single purpose apps. We navigate through routes determined by Google maps. We read the news sifted by aggregators like Flipboard. We photograph our memories through filters on apps like Pixlr express. We network through Linked In.
Howard Gardner and Katie Davis write, “Apps that allow or encourage us to pursue new possibilities are app-enabling. In contrast, when we allow apps to restrict or determine our procedures, choices, and goals, we become app-dependent.”
The three primary areas of psychological experience that concern the authors are identity, intimacy, and imagination. Throughout the book Gardner and Davis illustrate ways that we can become app-enabled or app-dependent in these three areas. Some quotes…
On identity:
With respect to identity formation: Apps can short-circuit identity formation, pushing you into being someone else’s avatar (that of your parents, your friends, or one formulated by some app producer)–or, by foregrounding various options, they can allow you to approach identity formation more deliberately, holistically, thoughtfully.New media technologies can open up new opportunities for self-expression. But yoking one’s identity too closely to certain characteristics of these technologies–and lacking the time, opportunity, or inclination to explore life and lives offline–may result in an impoverished sense of self.
On intimacy:
With respect to intimacy: Apps can facilitate superficial ties, discourage face-to-face confrontations and interactions, suggest that all human relations can be classified if not predetermined in advance–or they can expose you to a much wider world, provide novel ways of relating to people, while not preventing you from shutting off the devices as warranted–and that puts YOU in charge of the APPS rather than vice versa.The quality of our relationships in this era depends on whether we use our apps to bypass the discomforts of relating to others or as sometimes risky entry points to the forging of sustained, meaningful interactions.
On imagination:
With respect to imagination: Apps can make you lazy, discourage the development of new skills, limit you to mimicry or tiny trivial tweaks or tweets–or they can open up whole new worlds for imagining, creating, producing, remixing, even forging new identities and enabling rich forms of intimacy.Apps are, ultimately, shortcuts.
Overall, I think the book reads best when imagined as a thought provoking and convincing characterization of “app consciousness.” It identifies a particular way of ordering the world and asks us to be mindful of the way a very specific, and often confined, kind of thinking is often presented with the promise of customization and personalization. I’ve found myself discussing the argument many times and with many people.
At first, however, I didn’t like the book. I thought it suffered from a bit of app-ification itself. I was skeptical of a causal connection between apps and the psychological development of young people. I thought it naive to imagine that apps were creating a siloed consciousness; apps seemed to me just another technological manifestation of a prevalent way of ordering the world into objects, products, and solutions.
As I reached the book’s conclusion, though, it was clear that authors use the concept of an app as metaphor more than as a concrete catalyst. When I spoke to Gardner and Davis, I was reassured to discover that they considered the App to be a useful signifier through which to represent and explain a larger phenomenon.
With laughter and sarcasm, Howard Gardner suggested I might want to title this article “App-Sense Makes The Mind Grow Finer.” I was immediately reminded of the philosopher Edward S. Casey’s observation of humanity’s current “passion for precision.” Both characterizations emphasize, and implicitly call into question, an image of sharpness, division, dualism, and high-definition that we narrow-mindedly consider to be better than fuzziness and ambiguity. Despite the platitudes, we still seem to prefer “black & white” to “gray.” Note our obsessive desire for HD screens; we mistake higher resolution and more contrast for a move toward clarity and realism.
If you follow me on Forbes you know that I regularly write about the positive influence of video games and technology. My intention has always been to do what I think “The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World” does so well. The book encourages us to approach technology mindfully and with intention. It reminds us that “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.” The book calls on us to ask questions about when our technologies, and therefore our ways of thinking, enable us and when they make us dependent. Do we have apps? Or, do apps have us?
Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.
