Twiterature

I identified wholeheartedly with the idea of the fragmented mind-not being able anymore to concentrate on one task at a time, especially if that task is taking place on or near a computer.  I found myself reading an article for this class, toggling over to iGoogle to see if I had any updates on Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, or my RSS feeds, switching over to Amazon.com to get a review for a book that was mentioned in one of the articles, and then clicking on Dictionary.com if I wanted the definition of word I didn't know. Being aware of this, though, didn't change my behavior at all. Having immediate access to  potential trivial information was/is just too tempting.  I imagine everyone else feels the same way.   Nicolas Carr talks about how the internet is actually changing our brains, how we think, react, feel, act in his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?.  We don't read like we used to, we don't concentrate like we used to, our expectations for short, fragments of info interspersed with snippets of flashy multimedia is becoming the new norm. The threat of artificial intelligence actually becoming smarter than us is lurking around the dark corner of the future.  Well, maybe it's not so doomsday, but he does have a point.

Okay. Let's realize something, though-computers cannot be programmed but by us (humans, that is) so I'm not really that worried about a world being taken over by smart machines.  Are you? That being said, technology definitely IS changing us, our behavior, our expectations.  We want it faster, more accurate, in our homes, at our fingertips.  If that is the case, who are and how must libraries reach their users? Will they even have users in the future? Are millennials really all that different from us oldies? For the obvious reasons that they have never  known a different, analog world-yes.  And they get to do much cooler stuff on their computers than we ever did. They get to create, have a voice (anonymous or not), be in constant contact with their peers, download and share music quickly with their friends, get instantaneous answers that we used to have to look up in a paper encyclopedia.  Someone else posted that they didn't really feel that far removed from millennials in the sense that they have stayed more or less up on technology.  I feel the same way.  And I don't think teens are a whole lot different than we were; they just have a new platform from which to express themselves.  It's fun to think about the ways a new generation will be-the new mindsets, the new ideas that are yet to be born, the differences in new values vs. the old ones, but one thing always remains the same-change is change.  As librarians, we have to be in tune with how the world and the people in it are changing and keep up with it.