This is a recent talk by Howard Gardner on his new book he co-wrote with Katie Davis. They use the app as metaphor for present youth and life as a ‘super-app’. The old digital native-digital immigrant myth pops up early in the lecture, but let us suppose this is because it’s a popular way of describing the relation rather  than not knowing that research has debunked this idea over and over again.

More interesting is the focus on identity, intimacy and imagination, e.g. the element of risk aversion, but than it because purely speculation, which is sad. Sherry Turkle pops up quite fast, and than the talk seems more and more to become an older adult fearing change. Maybe it would have been interesting to also read stuff by danah boyd. The element of intimacy fails again in this same way as Gardner overlooks the fact that most of the young people use social media to meet IRL (Howard this means In Real Life, just to add as you didn’t knew Beyonce before the Superbowl and still talks about Netscape) and again there is more speculation.

When discussing imagination the approach of focussing on drawings and writings send by young people to a magazine seems an interesting approach still it’s a subgroup of young people sending in such items and the link between digital media and this evolutions are also more suspected than being proven in this lecture.

I do like the distinction between app-enabled and app-dependent, although I think that the example is close to the differences between a coloring book and a blank piece of paper.

I sure will read the book when I get my hands on it and I hope it’s more nuanced than this speech. Would it be much different if I would talk about ‘the worry-generation’ when discussing parents and researchers?