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| Warren Dunes State Park, Michigan |
I usually arrive early to my MCCC philosophy classes. As students come they sit
down and bow before their smart phones, apping away.
This is our world today.
We're immersed in a surging sea of technological change that would cause Alvin
Toffler to confess that he underestimated the coming "future
shock."
How shall we understand this? I recommend Howard Gardner (Harvard) and Kate Davis's The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. Gardner and Davis examine the three aspects of the lives of young people that are most affected by digital technology:
·
their sense of
identity
·
their capacity for
intimate relations
·
their imaginative
powers
What about identity?
The apps on a person's smartphone are a kind of fingerprint. "It’s the
combination of interests, habits, and social connections that identify that
person." (The App Generation, p. 60) Gardner and Dixon ask: "How are
youth’s identities shaped and expressed in the age of the app? Are they truly
different or just superficially so?" (Ib.) They respond:
"We found that,
as suggested by the app icon itself, the identities of young people are
increasingly packaged. That is, they are developed and put forth so that they
convey a certain desirable— indeed, determinedly upbeat— image of the person in
question. This packaging has the consequence of minimizing a focus on an inner
life, on personal conflicts and struggles, on quiet reflection and personal
planning; and as the young person approaches maturity, this packaging
discourages the taking of risks of any sort. On the more positive side, there
is also a broadening of acceptable identities (e.g., it’s OK to be a geek). Overall, 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." (Ib., 61)
This suggests that the
capacity for today's youth to engage in the classical biblical spiritual
disciplines (solitude, silence, focusing on "Christ in me, the hope of
glory") is diminishing. Spiritually, this is disconcerting. As a culture
we are a mile wide and an inch deep. (I see students interested as they are
introduced to "deepness" in my philosophy classes, which is
encouraging. That capacity, for many I think, has not been deleted from their
cognitive hard drive.)
Gardner and Davis will
help you understand this, non-judgmentally.
See also Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the
Coming Dark Age, and Christian Smith's brilliant Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging
Adulthood, and Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual
Lives of American Teenagers.
We must first
understand before we can evaluate.
We must evaluate before we heal, if needed
(depth is good, shallowness is bad).