The Google generation?
Being born quite a way before 1993, I don’t qualify as part of the Google generation: made up of Western-born individuals who have grown up with the internet, ‘a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web’. I can remember life before the web. It wasn’t bad. Travelling in 1994, no-one knew where I was for months, and there was no way I could regularly communicate back home. As I said, not bad.
A recent story at Pandia.com looks at a new report released by the British Library and JISC conducted by the CIBER center at the University College of London. It contradicts or at least challenges the belief, first put forward by Mark Plansky (coiner of the term ‘digital natives’) that:
today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Pandia.com notes that… in another article Plansky backs up this claim by referring to research in the fields of neurobiology and social psychology. But the new report from UCL states that:
The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems. Internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.
This is a very important piece of research for social media and internet planners, developers and researchers, as it turns on its head some well-respected assumptions.
Here’s the report: The Google Generation summary report
No related posts.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
