Kids These Days and the Future of Reading
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for September 2002
We all know that our mutant children will inevitably change everything.
That sentence highlights three assumptions that, when I encounter them in articles and speeches, raise a big mental sign: “Warning: Probable Nonsense Ahead.” All three have entered into predictions of the future of reading. First, the outer two:
- Inevitably: People use “inevitably” when they lack convincing arguments. How often have you seen the success of a new technology proclaimed as inevitable when it was anything but? Adding such a claim does nothing to strengthen an argument. The intent is to stop argument: How can you argue with the inevitable?
- We all: This, and the shorter form “we,” should raise the same warning flag as “inevitable.” “We want to be connected all the time.” “We all use cell phones.” “We” is usually a dangerous oversimplification. We know that, don’t we? (See how easy it is?) Even within a narrower group, “we” is usually wrong. What if I claim, on behalf of the Library and Information Technology Association’s Top Technology Trends trendspotters, “We all believe that self-publishing is one of the five most important technology trends for libraries”? The group consists of only a dozen people and we’re techies. Although the group summary for 1992 includes self-publishing among five “trends to watch,” the statement would be false—some of us didn’t (and don’t) believe it’s one of the most important. Did you catch the “we” fallacy two sentences back? Do you really believe each trendspotter is a techie?
The third assumption
- Our mutant children: Claims that today’s youth are and will remain fundamentally different from us are so prevalent that I call them “KTD arguments.” Kids These Days (KTD) prefer to read everything from a computer screen; that’s how they grow up. Kids These Days hate books. Kids These Days have the attention spans of fruit flies and require instant gratification. Kids These Days just live for the new technologies, glomming on- to every one with utter delight.
Few commentaries actually say “kids these days,” but “the Net generation” and other wordings come out to the same thing: our mutant children. Here’s an elegant version from Italian author Umberto Eco in his contribution to the recent Text-e virtual symposium, held from October 2001 through May 2002 and sponsored by BPI, the French Public Information Library: “New generations are born with a mechanism for attention that is adapted to the screen.”
KTD arguments almost never include statistical evidence, and they have been around as long as kids have. Millennia ago, we were informed that the new generation was hellbent for ruination. Why should today be any different?
KTD and reading
Each generation changes the world to some extent—but it’s never the extent (and almost never the direction) that you’d predict from childhood or youth. There’s one other constant that strikes most of us as we grow older: We turn into our parents, with variations.
I suspect that Kids These Days regard advanced technology as an ordinary part of life—a set of tools—where too many of us still find it magical. Sensible people don’t regard tools as transformative. They use what works and ignore the rest. I hope and believe that’s likely to be the case with today’s youth. That means they’ll read print books when these work best.
At a conference this spring someone asked: “What is your response to those who say that children today who are growing up on the Internet will not be users of print books or traditional libraries?”
My off-the-cuff answer: Bull. That’s the short answer, but it’s almost good enough. If Harry Potter (130 million books and counting) isn’t sufficient refutation of this nonsense, publisher’s figures for sales of children’s and juvenile books should suffice—as should your own circulation figures!
Children grow up recognizing that the Internet is a tool, not life. A middle generation may expect too much from the Internet, but there’s hope for that generation as well. The kids will be fine, as long as we don’t abandon them to a virtual dystopia—and children who use public libraries and read books (as most do) will grow up to be adults who support public libraries and read books. They’ll do a lot more at libraries than just check out print books, and that’s true already.
Did you spot the fourth nonsense flag in the opening sentence? Short of nuclear war, nothing changes everything. Life goes on—and most people change slowly when they change at all.
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