All the World’s an App

By Jacob Mikanowski

What is the Internet doing to our minds?

I used to ask the Internet everything. I started young. In the late 1980s, my family got its first modem1. modem: 调制解调器，宽带猫。. My father was a computer scientist, and he used it to access his computer at work. It was a silver box the size of a book; I liked its little red lights that told you when it was on and communicating with the world. Before long, I was logging onto message boards to ask questions about telescopes and fossils and plots of science fiction TV shows.2. message board: 留言板；fossil: 化石。

I kept at it for years, buying new hardware, switching browsers and search engines as needed. And then, around 2004,I stopped. Social media swallowed my friends whole, and I wanted no part of it. Friendster and Myspace and Facebook—the first great wave of social networking sites—all felt too invasive and too personal.3. Friendster: 全球最大的社交网站之一；Myspace: 全球第二大社交网站；Facebook: 创办于美国的著名社交网站。I didn’t want to share, and I didn’t want to be seen.

So now, 10 years on, Facebook, iMessaging, and Twitter have passed me by.4. pass by: 对……没影响。It’s become hard to keep up with people. I get all my news—weddings, moves, births, deaths—second-hand,from people who saw something on someone else’s feed. I never know what’s going on. In return, I have the vain satisfaction of feeling like the last real human being in a world of pods.5. 因此，我感到自己是电子世界中最后一个真实的人类，但这种满足却没有意义。But I am left wondering: what am I missing out on6. miss out on: 错过期望得到的东西。? And is everyone else missing out on something I still have?

互联网时代，各种各样的应用填满了我们生活的方方面面。从早上起床吃饭、到上班工作、学习娱乐，甚至连晚上睡觉都有相关的APP。很难想象一个现代人从未体会过APP所带来的便利，因为在很多情况下，社交也是通过APP进行的。可以说，全世界不过就是个应用程序。对于这种现状，乐观者有之，悲观者亦不少。但不管怎么说，APP不过是方便生活的工具，而不是生活本身。文中的一些外国学者则提出了一些独到的见解，也透露出了对APP全方位侵占个人生活的一些担忧。

Virginia Woolf7. Virginia Woolf: 弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫，英国女作家，现代主义先锋。famously said that on or about December 1910 human character changed. We don’t yet know if the same thing happened with the release of the iPhone 5—but, as the digital and “real” worlds become harder to distinguish from each other, it seems clear that something is shifting. The ways we interact with each other and with the world have altered. Yet the writing on this subject—whether it’s by social scientists,novelists or self-styled “Internet intellectuals”—still doesn’t seem to have registered the full import of this transformation.8. self-styled: 自封的；register:表达；import: 重要性。

Speculation about the impact of technology on our present and future runs toward the extreme and the contradictory. Techno-utopians clash with techno-sceptics; extravagant claims of human perfectibility lock horns with dismal tales of cultural decline.9. 科技理想论者与科技怀疑论者之间发生冲突，过度的人性完美主义论调与文化衰退的凄惨论调之间产生争论。extravagant: 过度的；lock horn with: 与……意见不合；dismal: 惨淡的。This oscillation between boosterism and gloom is evident from a glance at some of the titles of influential books published over recent years:10. oscillation: 摆动；boosterism:积极拥护；loom: 消极悲观。Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter; Big Data: a Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.

Now we have two new books by academics—The App Generation and It’s Complicated (all published by Yale University Press)—each of which tries to bring some much-needed clarity to the discussion. These three books strive for a more balanced approach. Each comes at the question of what the Internet is doing to our minds and social lives from an empirical11. empirical: 经验主义的。, social-scientific point of view. But while they mostly avoid the extremes of jubilation and despair indulged in by so many other writers on the subject, all of them are limited by their own parameters as academic studies.12. 在这个问题上，尽管他们大多都避免了其他许多作家所沉溺的乐观或悲观情绪，但他们却被自身的学术研究所限制。jubilation: 欢呼，喜悦；indulged in: 沉溺于……；parameter: 限定因素。They raise big questions while proposing partial, cautious answers. With the exception of It’s Complicated—whose title signals its more nuanced13. nuanced: 细致入微的。approach—the books fail to draw big conclusions.

The App Generation was written by two professors of education. To discover what the Internet is doing to human consciousness and society,they have studied its effect on children. They begin with an assertion: that today’s young people are so immersed in technology “they’ve come to think of the world as an ensemble of apps.”14. assertion: 主张；be immersed in: 沉浸于；ensemble: 集合。

What does this assertion mean? It’s never quite clear. The App Generation doesn’t dwell on which particular apps are shaping children in their image. As the authors define it, an app is any software program that runs on a smartphone. Apps also provide an overarching metaphor for many other aspects of life.15. overarching: 包罗万象的；metaphor: 隐喻。Prayer is an app because it only works if“carried out according to… specified procedures.” Religion is a “superapp.” Of course, prayer and religion are not downloadable; they are “human choreographed16. choreographed: 精心设计的。,” as the authors put it. Yet young people, the argument goes, have come to understand these things as formally and functionally analogous17. analogous: 类似的。to genuine apps such as RunKeeper (which tracks your fitness)and TonePad (which allows you to make music on your iPhone). The author’s line of thinking lends itself to dire pronouncements—today’s youth inhabit “app consciousness, an app worldview”—and to terrible puns:“Could just the right ensemble of apps lead to a wholly ‘happy’ life?”18. lend oneself to: 有助于；dire: 可怕的；pronouncement: 看法；pun: 双关语。

Apps are essentially shortcuts to everything. By putting a solution to every problem in the palm of their hand, apps make children intellectually lazy. Worse, the children who rely on them to navigate the world turn out to be superficial narcissists and risk-averse people pleasers.19. narcissist: 自恋者；risk-averse:不愿承担风险的；people pleaser: 取悦别人的人。They’re also increasingly lacking in one of the most important elements of childhood: imagination.Much of The App Generation attempts to chart the decline of American creativity. They conclude that, for the app-dependent, creativity itself is becoming a matter of “remixing,”20. remix: 重新合成。rather than invention.

In the process of setting out their findings, they raise important questions: what is what they’re calling “the app generation”—the young people who have never lived without the Internet, without smartphones—actually like?

The behaviour of teens online can be baffling21. baffling: 令人困惑的。. But are they really more “riskaverse,” “dependent,” “superficial” and“narcissistic” than kids in the past? And are they in danger in some new, hard-to-track way? Danah Boyd, a researcher at New York University and Microsoft, isn’t so sure.

Boyd has spent over a decade interviewing teens about their use of social media, and in the process has developed a nuanced feel for how they live their online lives. Throughout It’s Complicated, she shows teens to be gifted at alternating between different languages and modes of selfpresentation, assuming different personas for different audiences and switching platforms (say, between Facebook and Twitter and Ask.fm) based on their individual interests and levels of privacy.22. assume: 呈现；persona:人格面貌；Ask.fm: 欧洲一个社交问答网站。She also suggests that many of the fears associated with teens and the Internet—from bullying to addiction—are overblown23. overblown: 过分渲染的。. She argues convincingly, for instance,that “Social media has not radically altered the dynamics of bullying, but it has made these dynamics more visible to more people.”

Social media may not lead to more bullying or addiction, but it does create lots of drama. Boyd and her sometime-collaborator Alice Marwick define drama as “performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media.” Essentially, “drama” is what keeps school from being boring, and what makes it such hell. It’s also the reason teenagers spend so much time online. The lure isn’t technology itself,or the utopian dream of a space in which anyone could become anything,which drew many young people to the Internet in its early bulletin-board and newsgroup days;24. lure: 诱惑；bulletinboard: 电子布告栏。it’s socialising. Teens go online to “be with friends on their own terms, without adult supervision, and in public”—and Boyd argues that this is now much more difficult than it used to be. She portrays the US as a place in which teens are barred from25. be barred from: 禁止。public spaces such as parks and malls,and face constant monitoring from parents, teachers and the state. This is a paranoid country, in which parents try to channel all their children’s free time into structured activities and are so afraid of predators that they don’t allow their children outside alone.26. paranoid: 多疑的；channel into: 引导；predator: 捕食者。In this “culture of fear” social media affords teens one of their few avenues for autonomous expression.

One thing neither of the two authors address in depth is the way the Internet has altered modes of communication. Social media and blogging platforms like Tumblr27. Tumblr: 全球最大的轻博客网站。are increasingly making it possible to conduct whole conversations entirely in pictures. And what about our changing perceptions of time and space? In The App Generation, Katie Davis remarks that her younger sister has never had the experience of being lost,and probably never will, unless she loses her phone. What does never getting lost do to someone’s experience of the world? With GPS everywhere, is a forest still a forest or is it just a collection of trees? And how many other states of being are vanishing? Boyd insists that “the kids are alright”—but her book also suggests that they are never really alone. Are boredom, solitude and aimlessness on their way out, too?

These rapidly vanishing28. vanishing: 消逝的。experiences matter—to philosophy and literature, above all. For Martin Heidegger29. Martin Heidegger: 马丁·海德格尔，德国哲学家，20世纪存在主义哲学的创始人。, the feeling of profound boredom—which he felt while waiting for a train at a provincial train station, for instance—brought one closest to the kind of active attention that separates human beings from animals. Boredom drove Michel de Montaigne30. Michel de Montaigne: 蒙田，法国文艺复兴后期、16世纪人文主义思想家。to write his self-reflections. And once he started, he needed absolute privacy and silence to continue. He found them in the corner of his library, the sort of corner Bachelard31. Bachelard: 巴什拉（1884－1962)，法国哲学家。spoke of when he wrote: “When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners, we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts.”

Maybe it’s time to start asking questions about exteriority32. exteriority: 外部事物。; to switch from the corner to the phone, from the introspective33. introspective: 内省的。essay to the online profile. Starting some 500 years ago, the self was understood as an enclosure. It was something that required silence to access and space to experience. I think that used to be true. It probably still is. But it might not be for very much longer.