The App Generation by Howard Gardner, Katie Davis

noted, ready-made visual images are never more than a mouse click or finger swipe away from today’s youth. The Internet provides young people access to a greater quantity and wider range of art than in years past. By comparison, youth’s access to the literary medium hasn’t changed considerably over the years—in fact, the hegemony of the graphic medium may have displaced it. Indeed, linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath observes that owing to the increase in visual stimuli provided by television and the Internet, youth today are more likely to say “Did you see?” rather than “Did you hear?” or “Did you read?” 18 It is likely that today’s young artists draw on this store of visual imagery when they create works of art. Seen in this light, the increased complexity and departure from convention that we detected in teens’ art may be less about breaking new ground than about skillfully retreading old. With respect to our analysis of teen fiction, the increased conventionality and use of informal language we observed may reflect the pedestrian language of the tweets, texts, and instant messages that form a substantial portion of youth’s daily reading. (We also wonder if these shifts have any relation to the fact that in 2013, after adding a supplemental four hundred word essay to its list of required application materials, Boston College saw a 26 percent decrease in applications. If there were only an app for why one should want to go to BC!) 19 Put succinctly, what seems creative on the surface may actually be re-creative.
    In addition to constraining youth’s creativity, digital media may also disrupt the mental processes conducive to creativethought. Individuals generate new ideas by reflecting on the world that surrounds them. Reflection requires attention and time (counterintuitive as it may initially seem, boredom has long been a powerful stimulator of the imagination), two things that are hard to come by in today’s media-saturated world. 20 Consider the simple act of walking the dog. Before cell phones, it was just you and the dog. In its singular focus, this daily routine (for some, considered a chore) afforded plenty of room for the mind to wander and maybe even stumble on a creative thought. Now, it’s just another opportunity to multitask.
    In a briefing paper published by the Dana Foundation, cognitive neuroscientist Jordan Grafman expressed the following concerns about our constant state of divided attention: “I think that one of the big trade-offs between multitasking and ‘unitasking,’ as I call it, is that in multitasking, the opportunity for deeper thinking, for deliberation, or for abstract thinking is much more limited. You have to rely more on surface-level information, and that is not a good recipe for creativity or invention.” 21 In support of this claim, there is evidence that individuals who engaged in multitasking displayed cognitive processing that was less flexible and more automatic than subjects who engaged in a single task. 22
    It bears mentioning that breaks in attention can sometimes be good for the creative process, particularly when the goal is to arrive at a sudden insight, or eureka moment. According to the incubation effect, time away from a task enables individuals to restore their cognitive resources, gain new perspective,and avoid impasses. 23 Still, research suggests that it’s best when those breaks are chosen by the individual rather than imposed externally in the form of scheduled interruptions. 24 To be sure, today’s media landscape provides ample opportunities for self-selected breaks (provided we don’t become so absorbed in reading Facebook updates or watching YouTube videos that we abandon our task completely). But this ubiquitous surround also brings frequent interruptions in the form of pinging emails and buzzing phones—or, should these interruptions fail to