Facebook, Helicopter Parents, and other Interesting Phenomena

Today, I hope to put into production a manuscript by University of Rochester’s Susan Gibbons. The book is about “Net Genners”—the now college-aged contingent who grew up spending their after-school time being shuttled in their parents’ mini-vans to organized sporting events; singing along with Barney, who reassured them how special they were; IMing each other while simultaneously listening to music, doing their homework, and playing videogames.

Of all the discussion swirling around about what the emergence of these digital natives means to the future of librarianship, I think Susan Gibbons pins it down in the most concise, compelling, and practical manner. What makes her perspective especially interesting is that she and her colleague at the University of Rochester, David Lindahl, won a grant to have a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Nancy Fried Foster, study the habits of faculty (mainly to understand how to develop the institutional repository) and then, in a later study, the habits of students. For two years, Foster observed this fascinating species in their natural habitats…skipping through their eating and mating habits (probably for the better)…to find out how they approach their academic work.

As data emerged, Gibbons found she had to toss aside some preconceptions…that students’ Xboxes, IM accounts and IPods were at best, secondary to their academic work, at worst, distractions. Instead, she concluded:

It did not take long before I realized that my preconceptions were completely wrong. iPods, cell phones, wikis, instant messenger, and online games are not ancillary to traditional academic tools, such as books, laptops, and lecture halls. Rather, these technologies had become essential to the students’ academic toolkit. Moreover, if academic libraries wanted to continue to be a vital part of the academic success of undergraduate students, we needed to embrace these technologies as well.”

While reading this manuscript, I was struck by how different these “kids” are today. When I was a college student, my folks would drop me off at the front door to my dorm, slip me $20 or $30 “for emergencies” (money immediately went to the Friday-night beer fund), and drive away. I’d talk to them from the short-corded phone affixed to the wall of my dorm room every Sunday. Nowadays, wireless “family share plans” mean that college kids talk to their parents just about every day. And, if they have a research paper to write, chances are that Mom and Dad will be consulted during the research process. (They call this parental involvement “helicopter parenting”, by the way).

I couldn’t look up cute guys on Facebook, I was lousy at multitasking, and, yes, I knew that a research paper meant a trip to the library. No Google searches of packages from Amazon for me.

This is an interesting read (you’ll be able to read it for yourself in the fall). There’s no handwringing over the eventual demise of the library in this book. Instead, Gibbons provides some cultural background, specifics of how students interact with technology, and, most important some advice on how libraries can get into the game.