iGen | Twenge, Jean M.

Lange Beschreibung
As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today's rising generation of teens and young adults.

Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person-perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality.

With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation-and the world.

Rezensierung
Named one of the 'Best Tech Books of 2017' by Wired Magazine

Buchausschnitt
iGen Introduction Who Is iGen, and How Do We Know?
When I reach 13-year-old Athena around noon on a summer day, she sounds as if she just woke up. We chat a little about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I ask her what she likes to do with her friends. 'We go to the mall,' she says. 'Do your parents drop you off?' I ask, remembering my own middle school days in the 1980s when I'd enjoy a few parent-free hours with my friends. 'No-I go with my family,' she says. 'We'll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we're going. I have to check in every hour or every thirty minutes.'

Hanging out at the mall with your mom around isn't the only difference in teens' social lives these days. Athena and her friends at her middle school in Houston, Texas, communicate using their phones more than they see each other in person. Their favorite medium is Snapchat, a smartphone app that allows users to send pictures that quickly disappear. They particularly like Snapchat's 'dog filter,' which inserts a cartoonish dog nose and ears on people's heads as they snap photos. 'It's awesome-it's the cutest filter ever,' she says. They make sure they keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they screenshot particularly ridiculous pictures of friends so they can keep them-'it's good blackmail.'

Athena says she spent most of the summer hanging out by herself in her room with her phone. 'I would rather be on my phone in my room watching Netflix than spending time with my family. That's what I've been doing most of the summer. I've been on my phone more than I've been with actual people.' That's just the way her generation is, she says. 'We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.'

iGen has arrived.

Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet.

The oldest members of iGen were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and high school students when the iPad entered the scene in 2010. The i in the names of these devices stands for Internet, and the Internet was commercialized in 1995. If this generation is going to be named after anything, the iPhone just might be it: according to a fall 2015 marketing survey, two out of three US teens owned an iPhone, about as complete a market saturation as possible for a product. 'You have to have an iPhone,' said a 17-year-old interviewed in the social media exposé American Girls. 'It's like Apple has a monopoly on adolescence.'

The complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen'ers' lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. They are the first generation for whom Internet access has been constantly available, right there in their hands. Even if their smartphone is a Samsung and their tablet is a Kindle, these young people are all iGen'ers. (And yes, even if they are lower income: teens from disadvantaged backgrounds now spend just as much time online as those with more resources-another effect of smartphones.) The average teen checks her phone more than eighty times a day.

But technology is not the only change shaping this generation. The i in iGen represents the individualism its members take for granted, a broad trend that grounds their bedrock sense of equality as well as their rejection of traditional social rules. It also captures the income inequality that is creating a deep insecurity among iGen'ers, who worry about doing