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The Google generation?
Jan. 23rd, 2008 05:54 pmAs a sequel to one of the threads on my yesterday post: Today I was reading an article from last week's Times in which an academic was claiming that today's 18 year olds generally have no ability to assess sources of information. They believe every last word they read on the internet, accept Wikipedia as the source of all truth, and think that the first site thrown up by a Google search is always the most relevant.
Now, this is something I've noticed in some older people. When I hold sessions for older novice computer users, they generally think that every word on the internet is true. I've likened this to the illiterate peasant's belief in the magical power of the written world. When you're defeated by double clicking, you tend to think that only super-geniuses can actually put up websites. Younger people, though, have been brought up with computers and the internet. Many of them probably have websites of their own, so surely they must know that any fool and his dog can put stuff up there and claim it's true. I'd have thought that they would be less likely to believe what they read nowadays. A proper published book exudes (whether rightly or wrongly) quite a lot of authority, and the internet makes it so much easier to see that different opinions exist (assuming you look). In "the old days", your local library might have one solitary book on a subject, and that might have been the only source of information that you could lay your hands on. Today you can instantly get a dozen websites that disagree with each other.
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Now, this is something I've noticed in some older people. When I hold sessions for older novice computer users, they generally think that every word on the internet is true. I've likened this to the illiterate peasant's belief in the magical power of the written world. When you're defeated by double clicking, you tend to think that only super-geniuses can actually put up websites. Younger people, though, have been brought up with computers and the internet. Many of them probably have websites of their own, so surely they must know that any fool and his dog can put stuff up there and claim it's true. I'd have thought that they would be less likely to believe what they read nowadays. A proper published book exudes (whether rightly or wrongly) quite a lot of authority, and the internet makes it so much easier to see that different opinions exist (assuming you look). In "the old days", your local library might have one solitary book on a subject, and that might have been the only source of information that you could lay your hands on. Today you can instantly get a dozen websites that disagree with each other.
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