The Google Generation: Are ICT Innovations Changing Information Seeking Behaviour? Information Search Behaviour Developments and the Future Learner

Citation

Mason, D. (2010), "The Google Generation: Are ICT Innovations Changing Information Seeking Behaviour? Information Search Behaviour Developments and the Future Learner", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 465-466. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011052052

Are ICT innovations changing information seeking behaviour? That is the core question of this book. It is widely believed that the internet in general, and Google in particular, have fundamentally altered how the current generation of students seek information. But is that belief really justified? The current generation of students have never known a world without the Internet. But is the “information society” really something new, and does easier access to information necessarily create new ways of thinking about it?

This book attempts to answer these questions by examining how new technologies emerged and were absorbed in the past, and trying to draw parallels with those experiences. The book starts by considering theories of diffusion and measuring the extent of use of ICT by young people today. The conclusion is that young people have not actually abandoned traditional media and moved wholesale to the internet. One of the concluding chapters assesses the quality of the research underlying much of the hype about the Internet generation and finds it less than convincing. Young people still use and value print and broadcast media. The next section reviews the research on Internet penetration and concludes that the Internet effect is not confined to the young: people of all ages are changing the way they access information. The effect of wikis, blogs, podcasting, games and social networking is examined in the context of how the experience of using these may be altering the expectations of people coming into higher education. The evidence is that the “Google Generation” is real and not just a marketing label, empirical evidence supports the concept.

The book then examines exactly how this new generation is seeking information, and the implications for higher education. However, instead of going over the familiar research on how students find information, this section focuses on the information‐seeking habits of the ‘digital scholar’, academics and professional researchers in higher education, and the implications for librarians. The chapter looks at new forms of knowledge production, especially the use of IT for collaborative research, and how the ever‐expanding demand for scholarly publications is being enabled by better technology and how online databases of that expanded output are changing searching habits. There is a discussion of the implications for citation patterns when older works are either more easily accessible online or are no longer accessible at all.

The concluding chapter attempts to sum up the overall position but is something of a letdown. It concludes that the technologies are still developing and higher education will need to adapt to them.

This book is well written, scholarly, and addresses an interesting question but it is hard to know whom this book is for. It is not a textbook, although there is much that would be useful to students, and it is not a review of the research literature, although there is detailed presentation of research findings. It does not advocate any particular strategy or suggest how higher education should address this new generation. The strength of the book is that it broadens the discussion of how digital technology is affecting education to include the study habits of the digital scholars, librarians and publishers, and for that alone it is well worth reading.