In a recent post I pointed to CIBER’s report on Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf) which showed that Net Gen behaviours aren’t necessarily specific to one discrete age group. Nevertheless, the report did present some findings about the search activities of the younger demographic:
- The fit between search engines and students’ life styles today is ‘almost perfect’ — much better than is the fit for physical or online libraries (p. 7)
- The speed of young people’s web searching indicates that they spend little time in evaluating information for accuracy, relevance or authority (p. 12). But this also seems to be a pre-Web phenomenon (p. 23)
- There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before (p. 12)
- Young scholars are using tools that require little skill and are satisfied with very basic forms of searching (p. 14)
- Young people find it difficult to assess relevance when presented with a long string of hits (p. 12)
- It is likely that young people have good parallel processing skills, but it is unclear whether they are similarly developing the sequential processing abilities required for ordinary reading (p. 18)
- There is no evidence that young people are expert searchers. Studies pre-Web also reported that young people had difficulty in selecting search terms. (p. 22)
- There has been an increase in full-phrase searching, but this, too, predates the Web (p. 22)
I think the most important thing we need to take away from this report is the notion that the lack of sophistication and critique that characterises young people’s information searching is not a new phenomenon, brought about by being online: rather, youngsters have always had trouble evaluating and assessing information for relevance — perhaps it’s just that now their information searching behaviour is more public.
There’s always a lot of controversy whenever you start describing the social and online behaviours that characterise the ‘Net Gen’: Are they critically engaging with what they’re doing? Are they really able to keep a track of all that info that’s coming at them? What about online predators? Are the kids getting enough fresh air? Things get even hairier if you use the term ‘Digital Native’ (for some reason ‘Net Gen’ is less controversial than is ‘Digital Native’): There are lots of people born before the Net Gen who are perfectly at home in cyberspace; not all youngsters are ‘natives’ to this environment, anyway; this is all simplifying things too much.
