It has been seven years since Marc Prensky launched the concept of digital natives (the post-www generations) and digital immigrants (everyone else!) on the world. His definitions and terms have come in for scrutiny and debate since then, but they are an undeniably powerful metaphor for the change which all too evidently surrounds us. The most important point in his argument is that we are not witnessing a simple ratcheting up of incremental change but have reached a point of discontinuity marked by fundamental change. Digital natives are, quite simply, different people.
This proposition can be combined with the concept of ‘aliteracy'. Quite different from illiteracy, this applies to those who can read and write, but for whom literacy in the classic sense is an optional extra. The press is full of stories of what is seen as dumbing down; students who can neither spell nor punctuate nor construct a sentence - far less parse one; students who can't do mental arithmetic and who use strange abbreviations when ‘txtng frnds'. This can be construed as inter-generational grumpiness, but in reality this too is part of the larger discontinuity. Prensky quotes some figures:
‘Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives'.
Instant Results, Instant Gratification
This new breed of information user doesn't simply want everything made simple. They have a quite different value structure. On the one hand they want choice, being much less clear that there is right information and wrong information, but at the same time they want selectivity. They want instant results and instant gratification because a fundamental tenet is that convenience trumps quality. They want just enough to complete the task in hand - not complete or perfect. So it has to be cheap, fast and good. Both information and technology have to be mobile and available anytime, any place, anywhere.
Such users expect research to be easy and feel they can be independent in the process. They don't seek help from librarians and only occasionally from teachers or peers. As a result, when they can't find what they need, they give up and assume that the information cannot be found. Students often stop after their initial searches thinking they have completed the research process and fail to choose a particular focus. If it's not on the Web, it doesn't exist. Access to full text articles seems to have changed students' cognitive behaviour. Instead of having to read through material at the library, they can now download material at their desks. They do not have to take notes or read through them to develop themes and ideas, an activity central to a focused research project, because electronic articles enable cutting and pasting, almost certainly leading to increased plagiarism - although I suspect that this is done through ignorance more often than malice.
A further perspective on this new type of user comes from Beloit College. Every year, it creates a yearbook which amongst other things describes the attributes of the students it is accepting - The Beloit College Mindset. The following is conflated from lists for the last three years:
They have grown up with bottled water.
Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography happens in real time.
They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.
Information is ephemeral and consensual not authoritative.
They grew up with and have outgrown faxing as a means of communication.
‘Google' has always been a verb.
Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
‘Ctrl + Alt + Del' is as basic as ‘ABC.'
They have never been able to find the ‘return' key.
Computers have always fit in their backpacks.
Stores have always had scanners at the checkout.
They have always had a PIN number.
They don't remember when ‘cut and paste' involved scissors.
Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars.
Adapting to the natives
If this view of an emerging breed of digital natives is correct, it should quite fundamentally affect how we approach the changing environment. Web 2.0 can then be seen not as some new technology to which we must respond but as a manifestation of how digital natives manage their world.
Much less noticed in Prensky's writing is the notion that content may itself be in the process of change. A short quotation from his seminal article shows just how chilling a concept this is:
‘It seems to me that after the digital "singularity" there are now two kinds of content: "Legacy" content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and "Future" content. "Legacy' content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc - all of our "traditional" curriculum. It is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek. "Future" content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc, it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them.'
Increasingly, we can expect to work in a world shorn of its certainties and in which most information is in practice ephemeral. We already have a situation in which 44% of websites disappear within a year - and this applies as much to national libraries and museums as it does to bedsits in Clapham. It is a world in which much content is both user-created and image-based and where Wikipedia, not Britannica, will be the normal entry point to information and where information is therefore democratic rather than authoritative.
Managing, not just storing information
Perhaps the most effective response is to work with the grain. The Bodleian Library recently found an entry on Wikipedia describing one of its South American manuscript treasures. The entry was wrong. Rather than complain or have the entry withdrawn, the Library simply had its staff correct it. That is much the most effective response. Much more, we need to consider how we can manage information and access to it and not simply store it. A recognised gap in a web-based information world is trust metrics. A curious by-product of our professional past is that librarians are trusted as impartial, even-handed and good at getting appropriate information. This provides an obvious building block where resources validated by librarians or kite-marked on websites will become preferred sources. The very Ranganathan-like concept of the right information to the right user at the right time becomes a perfect response to this discontinuity.
It is all too easy to see the prospect of an alliterate world in apocalyptic professional terms. Much better to recognise that repurposing our skills, particularly in the areas of building collections of born digital materials, providing trust metrics and kitemarking and teaching information literacy skills will be more prized than ever. The trick will be to ensure that our profession responds to this, rather than abandoning the field to others while we guard the gates of our paper based storehouses of knowledge.
Derek Law has worked in several British universities and published an indecently large number of book chapters, articles and conference papers. Most of his work has been to do with the development of networked resources in higher education and with the creation of national information policy. Recently he has worked on the use of wireless technology in developing new methods of teaching and learning. This has been combined with an active professional life in organisations related to librarianship and computing. A committed internationalist, he has been involved in projects and research in over 40 countries.
He was awarded the Barnard prize for contributions to Medical Informatics in 1993, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1999, an honorary degree by the Sorbonne in 2000, the IFLA medal in 2003 and Honorary Fellowship of CILIP in 2004.
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It has been seven years since Marc Prensky launched the concept of digital natives (the post-www generations) and digital immigrants (everyone else!) on the world. His definitions and terms have come in for scrutiny and debate since then, but they are an undeniably powerful metaphor for the change which all too evidently surrounds us. The most important point in his argument is that we are not witnessing a simple ratcheting up of incremental change but have reached a point of discontinuity marked by fundamental change. Digital natives are, quite simply, different people.
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