The Google Generation

July 7th, 2008

In 2007 Ian Rowlands was commissioned to research The Behaviour of the Future Researcher by JISC and The British Library. For the Google Generation (those born after 1993) information retrieval was an integral part of their cognitive development. They learned their alphabet at the computer keyboard, navigated the internet through the Google search window and joined social networks at a young age. Surely, their reactions and expectations of the world would be very different from we who grew up trolling volumes of encyclopaedias for our school reports.

At the ISKO UK event on Information Retrieval held last week at University College L,ondon, Ian Rowlands announced the result of his research project. To a large crowd of librarians, information architects and knowledge managers, he concluded that the Google Generation was a myth; that the behaviour of this younger generation was really no different than any other generation that preceded them. While technologies and tools have changed, our reactions to them and our basic behaviour has not. Access to an unprecedented amount of information has not intrinsically changed our expectations of the world.

Yet we continue to believe that books and information have been so dumbed down that anything of value has been sacrificed to deliver the ever popular sound byte. We believe that when our children use the internet as a research tool they accept any answer for THE answer and never think to validate their references. We convince ourselves that information that hasn’t been discovered over hours of pouring through card catalogues, micro fiche, and obscure rare book repositories lack depth and authority.

The truth is that information is still the same. There is the good and the bad, the subjective and reactionary, the obscure and popular. It is simply our access to it that has changed and that directly affects the professional information or knowledge worker. Sadly, our days may be numbered.

This month’s cover story for Wired Magazine, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, touches on the changes the petabyte generation will have.

Here, an excerpt from Chris Anderson:

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

The generation, Google or otherwise, shall prevail, as they should do.

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