1993 | Anna Daniszewski, a sophomore at Bard College, takes a dozen or more cell phone pictures daily, usually around dusk or after dark—moody shots of found objects, bare branches against a gray sky, or lighted windows in the distance, evoking the way sensitive, artistic young men and women have always felt about life. You can totally imagine Goethe doing the same thing, preserving each precious instant of angst for the posterity that would someday recognize his genius. Except Daniszewski doesn’t preserve them all; some she sends out with Snapchat, so they appear on friends’ phones for around six seconds before vanishing irretrievably. In an era when everyone has the tools to be an artist and everything is recorded and stored—potentially forever—this counts as provocation. Daniszewski is embracing the ephemeral.

For Daniszewski’s cohort, the roughly 4 million Americans born in 1993 (she herself was born in the second week of 1994), such contradictions must constantly be negotiated: public versus private, virtual versus real, active versus passive. On one hand, millennials consume so much media they can’t concentrate, torn as they are between texting, posting on Facebook, and watching YouTube. And yet they also have an astonishing ability to focus on elaborate videogame play for six-hour stretches or to watch complex, multistranded television dramas in binge sessions that can swallow a weekend. They are experts in driving games like Gran Turismo 5, but they’re not that interested in actual driving. (When Americans born in 1978 turned 16 years old, 42 percent had driver’s licenses; the comparable figure for millennials is less than a third.)

They are the Nisei of cyberspace—the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life and so never had to adjust to it as the rest of us settlers have. Like all Nisei, they understand the new world in ways their parents never will and speak its language with far more fluency. If you want to understand the past two decades, they are perhaps the perfect subjects. The drumbeat of disruption and technological advance that has defined the past 20 years is their natural rhythm.

I was born in 1949, so the first 20 years of my life spanned a similarly disruptive era. But the forces that molded my generation were political and cultural, not technological. Nothing in my use of vinyl records or radio or the telephone set me apart from people who were born in 1929 or 1909.

The digital Nisei are different: Technology has shaped not just how they navigate the world but how they see themselves. Each generation imagines itself as rebellious and iconoclastic. But none before has felt as free to call bullshit on conventional wisdom, backed by a trillion pages of information on the web and with the power of the Internet to broadcast their opinions. They have thrown off the shackles of received culture—compiling their own playlists, getting news from Twitter, decorating web pages with their own art.

But at the same time that technology has empowered the digital Nisei, it has also exerted control over them. The way they interact is influenced and mediated by the available tools. A Pew Internet survey from 2010 ranked the seven main ways teenagers communicated. Among then-17-year-olds, who are 20 now, in descending order these were text messaging, cell phone calls, landline calls, face- to-face, social networks, instant messaging, and—dead last—email. (Written letters didn’t even merit a footnote.) Teenage girls averaged 80 texts a day, Pew found. Boys, around 30.

Texting is perhaps the most efficient form of communication ever invented, stripping messages to a fine-grained, asynchronous channel. It is at once intimate, allowing communication on a level of informality that would be unthinkable in any other medium, and distant—replacing a commitment to a conversation with a series of one-sided communiquès. “Phone conversations make me anxious,” says Jennifer Lin, a freshman at Parsons the New School for Design. “I don’t like calling people and having them not answer. I don’t want people around me hearing what I’m saying. I don’t want to have to think about how to end the conversation—OK, bye, later, see you. I don’t want to talk to people. And it kills my batteries.”

Then again, texting—or DMing, or chatting on Facebook, or commenting on Instagram—comes with its own set of anxieties. Notes are worked over and polished to convey just the right balance of sincerity and indifference. And the lack of immediate feedback cuts both ways, psychologically. To be 20 is to wonder why you haven’t received a response to your latest message, to live in fear that your sarcasm was misunderstood. The younger the person, says Amanda di Bartolomeo, a Los Angeles psychologist, the more impatient they are for a reply. They devise elaborate theories involving lost phones, sudden term papers, and cool parties to which the sender wasn’t invited. Moreover, one of the great advantages of digital communication, the ability to present yourself in an ideal light, can be problematic: “I have friends who made boyfriends online and spend an inordinate amount of time composing emails to impress them,” says Maryam Mashayekhi, a 19-year-old from Washington, DC, taking a break from college for AmeriCorps. “What will they do when they meet in person and have to talk?”

Robert Leung | Writes software for HTML5 games.

Siya Raj Purohit | Is building a digital network for student organizations.

Anthony Ibarra | Tweets musicians to score free concert tickets.

Chance Vaughan | Uses Facebook to guerrilla-market his student organization.

Emily Jane Tagtow | Named her Kindles Karin and Sophia.

Christina Squiers | Thinks her hearing aid technology is “pretty much magic.”

James Romo | Hates taking class notes on a laptop.

Mark Jbeily | Manages his ROTC schedule with a shared Google calendar.

Nicole Frances Dudley | Used to IM strangers at random during middle-school sleepovers.

WHEN HE WAS 17, Peter Dykstra—a sophomore at UC San Diego—underwent a rite of passage: He swapped his first email address for a more grown-up-sounding one. (Dykstra had based his old one on a favorite Bible verse, but people wondered why someone named Peter had an email address that included the name John.) Previous generations expressed these kinds of personae and affiliations through the clothes they wore or cars they drove. When you can construct your own identity—sorry, identities—online and flaunt them to 10,000 times as many people as might ever see your bumper sticker, what difference does it make whether you drive a pickup or a Volvo? Millennials “care much less about stable identities and categories,” says Daniszewski, the cell phone photographer from Bard. “They are constantly changing online interactions and personas.”

That process of endless transformation has always been an important aspect of growing up—one minute you’re an emo kid, the next you’re a goth—but now it takes place in a competitive arena with a massive audience. On the Internet, status is measured in friends, followers, retweets, and pageviews. “On Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram,” writes Danah Boyd, who studies online culture at NYU and at Microsoft Research, “you’ll find teens who have hundreds of thousands—and even millions—of followers, more than most companies and more than many traditional celebrities.”

As recently as five years ago, Myspace was the leading social network. Many of its early adopters were California bands, Boyd says. Their teenaged fans, who couldn’t get past the door to hear them play in clubs, soon followed. This imparted to Myspace a whiff of urban danger, as alarming to parents, guidance counselors, and police chiefs as it was enticing to teens. The site’s popularity induced a national hysteria over sexual predators on the Internet.

And then, during the 2005-2006 school year, Facebook began accepting high school students. Boyd calls the subsequent move to its perceived safety “digital white flight.” Facebook’s Ivy League imprimatur and policy of requiring real (or, in practice, real-sounding) first and last names reassured both grown-ups and teens themselves. The moral panic over Myspace had a remarkable result: Instead of shutting down the new medium, it allowed an even more powerful expression to flourish.

Facebook’s real-name policy also made it harder for users to escape their past, especially those parts of it that were photographed in bathroom stalls. Billy Gallagher, former editor in chief of The Stanford Daily and a writer for TechCrunch, points out that one’s experience of Facebook is very much influenced by age. “A lot of older people, by the time they joined Facebook they already had a job and were posting baby pictures, not party pictures.” Their millennial-era children and siblings, on the other hand, had to frantically cull their Facebook pages before applying to college.

I am looking at the Facebook pictures of a woman named Abigail Muir, and there seems to be no end to them. I scroll past images of a doe-eyed 20-year-old with an electrifying cascade of red hair in every imaginable expression, dress, and pose—smoking, dancing, swimming, jumping on a bed in her underwear, now soulful, now playful, now glamorous. She even has a duck-face picture, the pursed-lips pout that marks the first awkward foray into sultriness for millions of adolescent girls. Her self-display might be considered ingenuous if she were planning to be, say, a nurse, but as a Parsons junior who wants to work in “design management, strategy, and branding,” she knows what she’s doing. “I work hard to maintain a staunchly hip online persona,” which she monitors on Klout, a service that measures followers, retweets, and other signifiers of web influence. (Her most recent score was around 60, well above average but considerably short of Justin Bieber or President Obama.) She is casual about what some might consider the risks of oversharing. In the future, she says, it won’t matter if you did post a picture of yourself covered in chocolate, because “the people who care will all retire and the world will be run by my generation, which doesn’t give a shit.”

Oliver Babcock | Grew up on a prison ranch 15 miles outside of town, without a car—so he socialized via Internet.

Ashlee Brunaugh | Does not use physical textbooks.

Michael Pieratt | Hosts, with friends, his own Minecraft server.

Maria Renteria | Pays her parents’ bills online.

Jen Nwuli | Binge-watched all 81 episodes of Prison Break in two weeks.

Kyle Moore | Composes drumline pieces with music notation software.

Heidi Tso | Keeps in touch with her boyfriend in the Navy “99 percent through Skype.”

Benjamin Brunell | Uses an iPhone to learn drug name pronunciations for pharmacy class.

THE WORLD OF present-day college students has been shaped by videogames, even if they didn’t play them as kids. Growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Brian Wong played the first-person-shooter Counter-Strike for 10 hours a day. He went on to found Kiip, a company that rewards online players with coupons for real things like coffee drinks. Wong, whose own scholastic achievements helped him skip four grades of school and graduate college at 18, hopes to expand the approach to any other accomplishment that can be measured, such as fitness goals or homework.

Videogames have also shaped how millennials strategize about life. These games impose a worldview subtly different from the precomputer one, in which a game required formal, transparent rules. Millennials grew up playing games into which creators had inserted hacks, shortcuts, and trapdoors for players to ferret out—or learn of from friends. “The evolution of games started to mimic the complexity of real life,” Wong says. “Life doesn’t come to you in a box with an instruction book.”

Indeed, you can’t navigate modern life without cheat codes. Consider the career path of 19-year-old Lucas Cruikshank, a Nebraskan who, at the age of 13, began a series of YouTube videos built around a shrill, hyperactive character he named Fred Figglehorn. The early Fred videos, which make Beavis and Butt-Head look like the Royal Shakespeare Company, slowly built an audience, and some have more than 50 million views, equivalent to the entire US population between the ages of 12 and 24. Cruikshank now has three cable movies and a weekly Nickelodeon show to his credit, which he says was always his plan. Capitalizing on the Internet’s bottomless appetite for disposable weirdness, he adroitly managed the transition from ironic I-can’t-believe-I’m-watching-this phenom to the beginnings of a career in Hollywood. He gamed the system.

The Internet has redefined, if not art, at least what it means to be an artist. Cruikshank is scrupulous about interacting with his 300,000 Twitter followers; he “can’t imagine having a TV show 10 years ago, when you couldn’t hear directly from your fans and answer their questions.” SoundCloud, a popular music site, takes this interactivity to an extreme, allowing users to post comments not only about a song but second by second during a song. The musicians get feedback on every single note. Artist and audience together produce works meant to be shared, reproduced, even revised by their nominal consumers. As the traditional machinery for distributing creative work—publishers, record companies, networks—has broken down, a new generation has figured how to bypass it and monetize their personae to an audience that has no interest in paying for discrete works or objects.

Jonathan Mak was an unknown graphic design student in Hong Kong when he found a back door to ubiquity. As a tribute to Steve Jobs’ 2011 resignation, he tweaked Apple’s logo to incorporate its founder’s profile. “It only received a smattering of notes on Tumblr,” Mak wrote in an email, “and I thought that was the end of it. Jobs passed away soon after that, and on the day the news broke, I reposted the design on my blog. Same graphic, same platform, but it was different this time.” Suddenly the image was everywhere, including, Mak says, Ashton Kutcher’s profile on Twitter, the designer’s first sign that something big was going on. The image remains an icon of the global Internet culture. Mak, aware of how jealously Apple guards its trademark, says he hasn’t attempted to make any money from his creation, but it did bring him a commission from Ogilvy & Mather’s China office to design a poster for Coca-Cola.

The system doesn’t always present such an easy target. Oliver Chanin, a musician who attends Eugene Lang College in New York City, composes mixtapes on a keyboard and laptop and uploads them to sites such as Bandcamp and Datpiff. His audio files stream from the cloud; his strategy is to build a base of fans who can be mobilized to hear them in a club. But it’s hard to find an audience when every other musician has access to the same listeners. And it’s further complicated by the fact that he is competing in a world “without musical boundaries,” says Anahid Kassabian, a music professor at the University of Liverpool and author of the book Ubiquitous Listening. Chanin’s audience could easily be listening instead to Korean pop or steampunk or any of the other microgenres proliferating on the Internet.

This, perhaps, is the most profound of the digital Nisei’s new rules: Make no distinction between the real and the virtual. Actions that begin in one realm play out in the other. They are interwoven. Every year, Beloit professor Tom McBride and collaborator Ron Nief compile the Beloit Mindset List, a guide to the cultural underpinnings of the undergraduate psyche. “They identify with websites more than with states or religions,” Nief and McBride wrote in 2009. McBride mused to me that his students might actually prefer to explore the Grand Canyon on a screen than to stand next to it and look down. I urged him to perform the experiment, which he did. He asked them to consider this question:

Karina Pieratt | Teaches basic engineering skills to middle-school girls.

Courtney Coleman | Tracks down mixtapes online.

Maria Magdalena Arrellaga | Works as a multimedia journalist but prefers print.

Suppose you had a choice between one “nonvirtual” vacation and an unlimited number of virtual ones. Take a building, such as the Taj Mahal. You can go to India, see the Taj Mahal actually in front of you, see its walls, explore its interior, smell its air. But then you’ve had your last trip. Or you can do something of the same thing online, complete with very large images and close-ups, plus various panoramic shots that you can manipulate, plus tons of hyper-textual information about what you are viewing. And once you’ve visited the Taj Mahal online, you can do the same with the Grand Canyon, Windsor Castle, the Andes, and so on.

Which would you prefer?

They aren’t crazy, these digital natives. They aren’t aliens. They all chose the real trip, every one of them.

Jerry Adler (jadler9999@gmail.com) wrote about high-frequency trading in issue 20.09.

Dan Winters; Hair and Makeup by Sabrina j. Lofti

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