Thursday, 24th January, 2008
Internet generation has the least general knowledge
A new study overturns the common assumption that the 'Internet Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.
Our dependence on search engines has changed the way we find and consume information. We no longer are dependent on libraries, we do not read newspapers but browse and view information online.
I did a short survey this weekend, to find out how much information 'Internet Generation' posses and their level of General Knowledge. I selected two groups of people, one which can be termed as Net savvy, who spend at least 4 hours everyday online and search for information online and the other group who spend most of the time offline reading books and newspaper, and use internet for just email and shopping.
I asked members of each group some general knowledge questions like 'Who is the president of India?', 'What is the capital of Israel?' and surprisingly 68% of the members of the 'Internet Generation' has given wrong answers, compared to 14% from the other group.
This leads me to very important conclusion, the 'Internet Generation', uses internet mostly for leisure and entertainment. In most of the developing countries like India, Internet is mostly used for Social Networking, Instant Messaging and Gaming.
Internet has also changed our digital information seeking behavior. Internet users collect content in the form of downloads but majority of the downloads are never read. Almost all of my friends have big e-books collection, but none of us ever read a full e-book. According to a survey1, average time spent by a user on a ebook is very short: typically 4 to 8 minutes respectively. We use digital information just for reference and never read online in the traditional sense, but just browse. According to another survey1 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 percent) never return.
The study conducted by CIBER research team and University College London summarizes that we are good at searching information but bad at processing it.
I do agree with you to some extent. I think people need to invest more time in books. Reading a hard copy book is much more informative than reading a book online.
With reference to you statement "Almost all of my friends have big e-books collection, but none of us ever read a full e-book.", I have to confess that I am one of those people.