Professional Notes

http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2008/09/categories-and.html

Those of you who have heard my Millennials talk know that I typically begin the thing with several sweeping disclaimers. See if any of this sounds familiar:

• “This all sounds a lot like astrology. You were born in November? Ah, a Scorpio! I know all about you.”
• “A twenty-year cohort is a big stretch. Think about someone you know who is ten years older than you, and another person you know who is ten years younger. How much do you have in common with them? How much do they have in common with each other?”
• “Being a part of a generation is more than shared experiences. It’s a matter of self-identification.”
• “I’m going to be painting with a very big brush here… Be careful not to get any on you!”

There’s quite a bit of pushback right now, online and off, about the traits generally assigned to the Millennials, particularly their fluency with all things digital. This is good. Prior to this, you only saw articles praising their ability to tell Mom and Dad how to log into their e-mail accounts, or how texting would change the world.

Truthfully, the Siva piece does a nice job of putting a lot of this nonsense into proper perspective. Yes, they are the Digital Natives, but that does not, in and of itself, mean that they know much about the technology that they use. Siva is right when he tells us that discussions of the Millennials’ digital literacy “presumes a level playing field” and that this is patently untrue. (And let’s be clear: technological literacy does not equal information literacy, and most students that I’ve worked with know this to be true themselves.)

However, there’s a danger in the tone of some of the pushback that we’re seeing. Rather than being used to keep everyone more honest about generational research, it seems to take a more mocking tone, suggesting that all generational markers are just a lot of hooey. Sorry, I don’t buy that.

Generational cohorts are like any other population. You’ll have those individuals who trend toward the center, and those outliers who give us a nice bell curve, by most any practical measure. The biggest problem I have seen with generational studies is that the cohorts are so big as to defy easy measures. A twenty-year cohort for any generation is unreasonably large. It’s how you can account for self-identified Boomers, complete with the “Woodstock-make-love-not-war-give-peace-a-chance” stereotype, voting George W. Bush into the White House on two separate occasions. Any population as large as the Boomers is going to shatter the stereotype a thousand different ways. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t Boomers who like to self-identify with the stereotype — in fact, many of them do.

In the end, information is information. All the attention given to the Millennial generation, all the surveys and cohort studies, provide us with information we can use as educators and as librarians. Pew Internet routinely provides exhaustive studies about how the internet is used and by whom. EDUCAUSE examines information technology in higher ed in various ways, including population studies. All such studies should be appraised critically, but to ignore useful data about our students just because it was labeled a “generational study” would be short-sighted and unwise.