The Googlization of Everything

ChronicleReview.com:

YOUTH & TECHNOLOGY
Generational Myth

Not all young people are tech-savvy

By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you talking about? There is no such thing as a "digital generation."

In the introduction to his book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (Macmillan) last year, Jeff Gomez posits that young Americans constitute a distinct generation that shares a sensibility: resistance to the charms of printed and bound books. Gomez, who has been a sales-and-marketing director for a number of global publishers, has written a trade book whose title and thesis demands that we ignore it. Alas, I could not.

"The needs of an entire generation of 'Digital Natives' — kids who have grown up with the Internet, and are accustomed to the entire world being only a mouse click away — are going unanswered by traditional print media like books, magazines, and newspapers," Gomez writes. "For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time."

When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes. And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the "kids today" or "this generation believes" argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.

Of course they use Google, but not very well — just like my 75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours, just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers. (According to the American Library Association, visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004).

What do we miss when we pay attention only to the perceived digital prejudices of American college students? Most high-school graduates in the United States do not end up graduating from four-year universities with bachelor's degrees. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2007 only some 28 percent of adults 25 and older had completed bachelor's degrees or higher. Is it just college-educated Americans who are eligible for generational status?

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital" willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged. It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time, knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender, and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions about digital media. ...