Free The App Generation by Howard Gardner, Katie Davis

altered the landscape of imaginative expression. They’ve affected virtually every facet of the creative process, encompassing who can be a creator, what can be created, and how creations come into being and find an audience.
    Let’s consider a few examples. If you’ve watched the Super Bowl (or, more important, the commercials) at some point over the past several years, you’ve likely seen one or more of the consumer-generated ads for Doritos. PepsiCo Frito-Lay, the company that sells Doritos, initiated the “Crash the SuperBowl” advertising campaign in 2007 by inviting fans to design their own thirty-second ads for Doritos and to vote online for their favorite finalists. After submitting their projects, many of the amateur filmmakers used social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook to build support for their commercials.
    For the 2012 Super Bowl, submissions topped 6,100 (the highest ever) and online voting reached into the hundreds of thousands. One of the competition winners—featuring a baby and grandmother duo who team up to snatch a bag of Doritos from a playground bully—scored the no. 1 spot on the USA Today/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. The Ad Meter itself marked the first time that USA Today partnered with Facebook to allow viewers—rather than preselected, “authorized” panelists—to choose their favorite Super Bowl commercial. The Ad Meter win earned the ad’s creator, a former special education teacher, a bonus prize of one million dollars from PepsiCo.
    To be sure, the “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign is partly a story about how corporations are finding ways to use social media to grow their profits. But it also illustrates how today’s digital media technologies are shaping the creative process in new ways. The introduction of inexpensive and flexible video-taking hardware (smartphones, digital cameras, tablets) and video-editing software (many of them available as apps like iMovie, Viddy, and Movie360) has both lowered the bar for entry into filmmaking and elevated the quality of amateur productions. The advent of social media is also transformative. 1 Scholars talk about the important role that “thefield”—essentially, those who judge any given work—plays in the creative process. 2 Video-sharing sites and apps like YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook have dramatically expanded the size of this field, as well as the amateur videographer’s access to it. 3
    Molly is one such amateur videographer who’s taking advantage of the creative opportunities introduced by digital media technologies. She started making videos at age eleven with the iMovie software that came standard with her first laptop, a MacBook. She found the software intuitive and enjoyed tinkering with the various effects, title sequences, and music overlays. Her movies have typically involved clips of time spent with friends and family, artfully pieced together and set to evocative music. She’s even posted a few on YouTube. “While they get nowhere near the millions of views that a Justin Bieber video gets, it’s nice to think my teeny videos have been watched by other people.”
    We’ve interviewed several other young creators during our research and found them to be using digital tools in a variety of imaginative ways. Nineteen-year-old Danielle told Katie about her experiences creating and sharing vids on the online journaling community LiveJournal. The young videographer described vids as short videos consisting of clips from a television show or movie and set to popular music. As such, they belong to the same family as musical mashups, made popular by the TV show
Glee.
Typically, there’s a strong fan community surrounding the chosen television show or movie. Viewers are expected to draw on their background knowledge ofthe original work to interpret the message conveyed by the vidder’s scene and music selections.
    The