Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream - Hardcover

Albright, Julie M.

 
9781633884441: Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1633884449 ISBN 13: 9781633884441
Verlag: Prometheus Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A sociologist explores the many ways that digital natives' interaction with technology has changed their relationship with people, places, jobs, and other stabilizing structures and created a new way of life that is at odds with the American Dream of past generations.

Digital natives are hacking the American Dream.

Young people brought up with the Internet, smartphones, and social media are quickly rendering old habits, values, behaviors, and norms a distant memory--creating the greatest generation gap in history.

In this eye-opening book, digital sociologist Julie M. Albright looks at the many ways in which younger people, facilitated by technology, are coming "untethered" from traditional aspirations and ideals, and asks: What are the effects of being disconnected from traditional, stabilizing social structures like churches, marriage, political parties, and long-term employment? What does it mean to be human when one's ties to people, places, jobs, and societal institutions are weakened or broken, displaced by digital hyper-connectivity?

Albright sees both positives and negatives. On the one hand, mobile connectivity has given digital nomads the unprecedented opportunity to work or live anywhere. But, new threats to well-being are emerging, including increased isolation, anxiety, and loneliness, decreased physical exercise, ephemeral relationships, fragmented attention spans, and detachment from the calm of nature.

In this time of rapid, global, technologically driven change, this book offers fresh insights into the unintended societal and psychological implications of lives exclusively lived in a digital world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julie M. Albright, PhD, is a sociologist specializing in digital culture and communications. She is a lecturer in the Applied Psychology and Engineering Departments at the University of Southern California (USC). Dr. Albright's research has focused on the growing intersection of technology and social/behavioral systems. She was the co-principal investigator and project lead for the behavioral component of a $121 million smart-grid demonstration project with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the USC Information Sciences Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and UCLA, which was funded by the US Department of Energy. She has also been a research associate with eHarmony. In addition, Dr. Albright has served as a peer reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, and a variety of professional publications. The author of a number of book chapters and multiple peer-reviewed articles, she has also given talks for major data-center and energy conferences , including SAP for Utilities, IBM Global , DatacenterDynamics, and the Department of Defense. She has appeared as an expert in such national media as the Today show, CNN, NBC Nightly News, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NPR, and many others.

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From the INTRODUCTION

Millennials are rewriting the rules. Millennials are the largest generation to come along since the Baby Boomers and are the largest group in both the workforce and consumer market since 2015. Due to their sheer numbers alone, their values, behaviors, and attitudes matter. Millennials are young, tech-savvy, and—increasingly—non-White. This combination of changing socio-demographic factors, their population size, and their tendency to want everything filtered through a digital interface means they will leave an indelible mark on society.

Enabled by mobility and digital connectivity, the sum total of these changes represents the emergence of a new social contract with vast implications for the social, economic, and political environments whose impacts will be as significant and far reaching as that of the printing press of the Industrial Revolution. I refer to these changes as a whole as “The Untethered Society.” I define coming “untethered” as: a condition in which ties to people, places, jobs, traditional processes, and organizing structures in society—like churches and political parties—are being weakened, broken, and displaced by digital hyperconnectivity.

Although untethering is increasing in scope across socioeconomic and generational lines, it is manifesting most notably among Millennials and those younger. An estimated 5,527,000 young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four are now living life untethered in the United States, totally disconnected from work or school. This represents about 13 percent, or about one in seven American youth today, more than the population of thirteen states. In certain cities like Philadelphia, the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year olds totally disconnected from work or school is as high as 25 percent. Most of the states with the highest youth disconnection rates are located in the South and Southwest, including Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina.

Like Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic powering along full steam ahead in the “unsinkable ship,” many Boomers (and those older) see only the tip of this iceberg, but do not fully grasp the magnitude of the impact of what’s ahead. Failing to plan ahead, and an overreliance on the “unsinkability of the ship”—we know how that story ends. The Untethered Society isn’t simply devices in hands or the number of text messages sent per month or the 1.44 billion monthly active users on Facebook or a few kids dropping out of high school. The Untethered Society represents a new set of technologies and behaviors coming together to create a new social DNA, and with it a new set of social problems and challenges to businesses and other institutions. The Untethered Society is the socio-genetic underpinning of a new constellation of behaviors, values, norms, and ideals for the Millennial generation and those following it—a double helix of technology and behavior that is reshaping the evolution of society going forward.

Like the dinosaurs before them, large and seemingly entrenched social, financial, and political systems are unraveling and being reconfigured as a result of this coupling, with some going extinct altogether. This double helix of behavior and technology is the genetic code for the social trends of the future—trends that have far-reaching global implications to reconstitute consumer behavior, political outcomes, home, and hearth—and indeed, the structure and workings of our very nation-state. Millennials aren’t simply shunning a long-standing, traditional concept of the American Dream—they’re hacking it. Groups like ISIS have already figured out how to tap into the Untethered Generation—with brutal viral videos of beheadings and increasingly violent acts and recruitment videos that look like highly produced video games that speak to a young, untethered (male) audience who grew up gaming. Such moves leave traditional political structures at a loss for a response. This is a war being fought—and lost—in social media. It is survival of the digital fittest. Recent polls show a loss in confidence in institutions in the United States ranging from political parties to the banks, from churches to marriage, home ownership and family, most notably among Millennials. What’s happening here? How and why are more and more Americans, particularly younger Americans, untethering from the American Dream?

I visited Shanghai to talk about the “Untethering of Millennials in America.” After my talk, many in the audience came up to me saying they were experiencing the same phenomenon there in China with their Millennials, despite the fact that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites popular in the United States are banned in that country. I realized at that moment that becoming untethered isn’t just a US phenomenon but, instead, we’re entering a new era of an increasingly untethered world. Cybernetic theory has taught us that change is destabilizing until a new equilibrium is reached. An Untethered Society, then, is ultimately an unstable one. Entrenched institutions that don’t understand the changes underway and that don’t evolve to address them may potentially go the way of the dinosaurs.

TRIAD OF TECHNOLOGICAL IMMERSION

The Untethered Society represents an uncoupling and reconstitution of the social contract, in sometimes unexpected and surprising ways. Our reliance upon and embeddedness within technological systems is growing. I have developed a theoretical framework for understanding the phases of these changes, which I am calling the Triad of Technological Immersion. It is an organizational scaffolding for the stages of technological and behavioral development. These stages are not sequential but, rather, operate simultaneously as each technological phase makes its appearance at various points of time and spreads, from its introduction as “the new shiny” adopted by early adopters through to becoming a fully mature technology with widespread adoption by the general population. The stages behave like a symphony, where the strings come in, then the woodwinds rise up, then the brass joins in, while all eventually operate together in (hopefully) a harmonious way. Yet while these technological systems may operate as intended, there are also unintended and disruptive consequences of each that will have widespread impact on society and on human lives. These are the three stages:

The first stage is the Untethered Society, which we are in now, where there is a ubiquity of digitally enabled mobile devices. During this stage, there is an increasing desire for a digital interface; behaviors revolve around connectivity and there is a simultaneous unhooking from traditional social structures/processes and institutions (like marriage, buying a house, having children, buying a car, having a long-term career—all aspects of what many have considered the American Dream). This is our current stage of technological immersion. All this connectivity has fueled a plethora of social behaviors, from online dating to the formation of social movements (e.g., the Arab Spring, #OccupyWallStreet, #MeToo, etc.) and has allowed many old friends to reconnect to one another via social networks. All this connectivity has a dark side, however: as more behaviors are conducted and documented online in social media and other places, more and more data is gathered, allowing computerized behavioral models to be developed that can be used in increasingly sophisticated ways to persuade or even manipulate audiences based upon their likes, fears, and psychological profiles as seen in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook.

Next to emerge is the Internet of Me (some call this...

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Verlag
Prometheus Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1633884449
ISBN 13 
9781633884441
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
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