The Net Generation[9] is a term coined to refer to a social demographic that coincides with widespread access to Internet-related technologies. These technologies allow simple, fast access to vast amounts of online information, and the ability to communicate and collaborate easily and cheaply.[10] Of most interest in the current discussion are some related social trends and changes in individual behaviour.[11]
Members of the Net Generation have been described as being digitally literate; connected; attracted by the immediate and experiential; social, team-oriented; interested in structure, engagement and experience; visual and kinaesthetic in their learning styles, and concerned with ‘things that matter.’[12] Although originally these were seen as attributes only of those born after about 1992, more recently both general technology research organisations[13] and more specific studies in the field of scholarly information[14] posit that many of these assumptions are not in fact age-based. However, these and other studies[15] have also determined that technology usage and expectations are influenced by a range of factors including social background, discipline, gender and role.
For the Net Generation, technology is both determinative and recursive: while it changes our routine work and study habits, we also expect to change the technology itself by adapting and repurposing it to do new things. Thus shared mobile telephones are used for e-commerce in Africa[16] and web applications that are based on collective knowledge and popularity form the basis of successful 21st century businesses.[17] These uses also highlight a cultural element to the digital shift — the Net Generation has come to expect a ‘beta test’ mentality, with rapid development of products and services, and trial and error learning — a different culture from that in most university libraries and IT areas which have traditionally focused on delivering more robust products and services, more slowly.
Perhaps most profoundly for universities, there is a move to more collectivist and democratic methods of creating and sharing information. This is exemplified by Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that is ‘built by the masses’ and yet rivals the centuries-old Encyclopaedia Britannica in accuracy and certainly exceeds it in circulation.[18] The Internet has created an unprecedented ability to collaborate among friends or strangers, and among personas that are real or virtual.
Today’s ‘new generation’ undergraduate students have grown up with the Internet. Google and Wikipedia are their first choices for information seeking, ahead of the library’s collections. Arriving in a university environment, the Net Generation encounters academics and libraries that pay credence almost exclusively to scholarly sources of information. As a marker of change, Wilder (2005) notes that if a new student today “were to use her library’s website with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help to understand the nature of electronic information retrieval.”[19] From the institution’s perspective, “In a media-saturated age, how does a university help students navigate their way through oceans of information to islands of knowledge, and from there to the getting of wisdom?”[20]