There's tremendous pressure to develop your brand as Katie says, very early to be a certain kind of person to broadcast that to other people and of course it's difficult to change it because you've already kind of made your chess move and you're stuck with it, and so, rather than having a full blown integrated identity which makes sense to you and to your surrounding, you may be pushed in to a premature form of identity where individuation is much less pronounced.
You are more tied in to the relationships you have with family, and not a chance to re-invent yourself as something which makes sense for today and for the life that you're going to be living and as I said earlier and this is something we didn't write about in the book, it's fine to have a more connected world, it's fine to have a world where we have more loose ties, if it doesn't mean we become selfish, egotistical, narcissistic, and expect everybody else to help us but we aren't reaching out and helping others. And the work that Katie and I have done, in what we call, "The Good Project," what it means to be a good worker, a good citizen, a good participant and so on, I am personally very worried that that kind of selflessness, that kind of empathy may be an endangered species, though I would love to be wrong.
I would love to think that there is going to be genuine as you said, connectedness rather than simply superficial connections.
R.K.: I share your concern. Now, The Good Project is something pretty substantial, there's a website for that, right?
H.G.: Called thegoodproject.org.
R.K.: .org, okay. Now you also talk about creativity, we only have a couple minutes left, we're going to have to skip that. Are there apps that you find the most hopeful? The ones that are the most transformative?
K.D.: Well it's funny, so when we are asked which apps are enabling and which apps are dependent, the answer is that there are many apps, most apps can be used in more or less enabling or dependent ways and so, but of course there are certain apps and unfortunately a lot of education based apps that definitely lean towards dependence where, you know they're highly structured, there are no sorts of opportunities for open-ended exploration, often they mimic this sort of drill and kill model of education where it's just one question after another, you either get it right or you get it wrong. There's no deviating from that path, you get rewards in the form of points or whatever reward system they offer.
Those types of features definitely lean toward dependence but we use this example of an app called Doodle Buddy for drawing, and, with that app there are certain modes you can use on it and one is a very free form, just a blank canvass; you choose different colors and you fill the canvass in any way you want. The other mode is much more aligned with the dependent mentality where you just sort of select some pre-fab images, you select some pre-fab backgrounds, you paste them on to your canvass and there you go. It's sort of a paint-by-numbers type of app and so that type of app and use of that app definitely tilts towards the dependent.
R.K.: Okay last question: Howard, you said in that question and answer session in England, "the disruption in education that I never thought would happen has happened and is different." And I assume that means that liberal arts and sciences and college and all education is changing. Now I want to throw, I found a quote from Whitehead that I have in my quotation database, "The task of a university is the creation of the future". So now my question is, how is education changing because of apps and what is good and what is bad and what can we do about it?
H.G.: Well what I had in mind is that if you look at the top fifty corporations fifty years ago, in terms of size and income and so on, and you look at the list today, there's very little overlap, I mean, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, I mean nobody heard of those. If you look in the United States and indeed internationally, at the list of the top fifty universities, no matter how defined, that's quite constant, there are very few changes, so I thought, wrongly, that you wouldn't have disruption in higher education, the way you had it in big corporations. But the high cost of education together with the rise of "Mooks," these mass of open online courses, and with what I call hypervocationalism, the feeling that the purpose of going to college is to get a job and make a certain amount of money, these are real threats to liberal arts and sciences as you said and they're real threats to those schools which take a skeptical view toward Mooks or toward any kind of an app directed at education.
I think that the "invention of the future" is a beautiful phrase because for people like me who are scholars and researchers, that means asking questions that haven't been asked before, trying to solve problems which society is facing, making use of interdisciplinary work and things like that, but it could also mean the future that Dave Eggers describes in his book, The Circle where essentially we live in a world where everything is an app devised by one mega corporation and if you can't survive in that app there's no place for you on the planet at all! So it's not just a question, Rob, of inventing the future or figuring out the future, it's which future do you want?
And that's the ultimate liberal arts question because the ultimate liberal arts questions are about the meaning and purpose of life. Why are we here? What can we do? And if it's just fun and pleasure and you're getting the most points, it's very different than if you say, we want to leave the world a better place than was given to us.
R.K.: Sounds like a good place to wrap up here. Anything else that you want to say? Katie?
K.D.: Just that I really hope that the readers of our book will read with a mind for considering where they fall on the spectrum between app enabling and app dependence and if they feel that they lean more towards app dependence, consider what they can do to take back some more agency with respect to the way they use technology.
H.G.: And I would say complimenting that, that young people look at what older people do, they look at what powerful people do, and so the way parents and teachers make use of technology has tremendous power, tremendous influence on young people. So do the ways in which people who devise apps, and what kinds of options they built in to them, but at the end of the day we have to become our own agents and the question is, do we remain in the driver seat when it comes to technology of any sort or do we turn it over willingly or let's say naively to somebody else's notion of what our lives should be.
R.K.: It sounds like you're talking about app-consciousness, you've got to transcend the apps almost.
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