Developing Minds & Digital Media (DM2)

With funding from The James and Judith K. Dimon Foundation, the Developing Minds and Digital Media (DM2) Project explored the intersection of human development and digital media in both cognitive and social domains. We sought to identify how today’s young people differ from youth who came of age before cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter. Our research involved three strands: qualitative interviews and focus groups with professionals who have worked with youth for over 20 years; examination of secondary data sources; and content analyses of young people’s creative writing and artwork.

In the first phase of our project, we conducted interviews with long-standing educators to cull their observations about how current students may be different from the students they taught in the pre-digital era. In phase two, we conducted focus groups with other professionals who work with youth, including camp directors, psychologists and psychoanalysts, and religious/spiritual leaders. As described in our research reports, contemporary adolescents are frequent multi-taskers and, as a result, may have limited capacities for deep reflection. They are constantly connected with friends and parents through their digital devices, with mixed implications for relationships with these intimates and for their sense of autonomy. Overall, our interviews suggested that young people today are disinclined to take risks and, related to this, their identities are increasingly outward focused and pragmatic.

We examined secondary data sources, such as survey studies with larger populations conducted over decades, in order to understand how young people’s sense of identity, intimacy, and imagination may be different today. Other studies suggest a decline in certain markers of creativity since the 1990s and greater difficulty developing intimate relationships. We set out to explore whether such changes, as well as the changes identified by our interview and focus group participants, are reflected in young people’s fiction writing and artwork from 1990 to 2011. Our research team conducted a content analysis of three sources: fiction essays published in a New-Orleans based high school literary magazine; short stories produced by eighth grade youth from an independent school in the Northeast; and artwork published in the Boston-based Teen Ink magazine.

Findings from these strands of our work have been synthesized in the book The App Generation, by Principal Investigator Howard Gardner and University of Washington Assistant Professor Katie Davis. The book addresses our broad research question: How are today’s digital youth different from their pre-digital predecessors? We focus on changes relating to three key areas of experience: young people’s experiences of themselves, others, and ideas – or, 1) identity, 2) intimacy, and 3) imagination. Importantly, we reflect on whether these changes constitute seismic or normal generational changes. Visit the book’s website today to discover more and to order.

If you are interested in the effects of digital media on young people, the Good Play project and the Our Space and Digital Literacy and Citizenship curricula may be intriguing to you.

Visit our Research Papers page to see a list of papers that have been produced by the DM2 project.

The Scholarly Publications page also contains a set of journal articles that have been published by DM2 researchers.