Book Summary: The App Generation

For this assignment I will be reviewing the book The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World written by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis. The idea for this book evolved from a conversation between Gardner and his colleagues of Harvard Project Zero regarding technology and how it influences the “ethical compass of young users.” This topic became of particular interest to Davis thus, she began her doctoral study on the subject at hand (Davis & Gardner, 2013). Gardner and Davis insert themselves into a new generation of “app enabled” and “app dependent” adolescent youth. This book contains three unique perspectives stemming from three different generations represented by Gardner, Davis, and Davis’ younger sister, Molly. Each individual comes with a different perspective of technology incorporated into their daily lives. Gardner, a “digital immigrant” in today’s world, has lived the majority of his life without technology compared to Molly, a “digital native”. Molly was born into a world dependent on technology such as cell phones, computers and tablets. Davis falls in the middle of Gardner and Molly as she transitioned from childhood to adolescence without the dependency of technology but grew from adolescences to adulthood with an emphasis on …show more content…
Yes, there are some negative aspects to this digital world, but it is here to stay. We need to use this technology to do great things. We need to let these youths teach us how we can use this technology to our advantage. It also helped me better understand how this technology is shaping today’s youth socially and mentally. It made me aware that the idea that empathy may be more difficult for digital natives to comprehend. I now know that these are things to look for when working with