The kids may be able to fly around the web at ludicrous speed, but if a basic search can’t find what they want, they could have a tough time digging up more information.
The next time your child hands you your cartoon butt in a battle on Acme Arsenal, you can take comfort in the little tyke’s relative inability to do the kind of critical, deeper thinking needed to make the most of searching the web.
Maybe that’s a petty statement, but after you’ve had your Foghorn Leghorn handed back to you in extra crispy for the tenth time in a row, you’ll take a moral victory over the Google Generation.
Resource Shelf said that Google Generation is a myth anyway. While the young people growing up with high speed Internet and rapid web search, a research paper from the CIBER research team at University College London said the kids have issues when the first page of the search results doesn’t have what they want.
“The untested assumption is that this generation is somehow qualitatively ‘different’ from what went before: that they have different aptitudes, attitudes, expectations and even different communication and information ‘literacies’ and that these will somehow transfer to their use of libraries and information services as they enter higher education and research careers,” the report said.
Those literacies may come at the expense of “creative and independent thinking.” Search engines may fit well with the college lifestyle, but when students apply the same habits with more critical sources, like electronic journals and other virtual library resources, they won’t retrieve the best results.
