Our digital lives

… Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. The Internet has come of age. Distinctions between the attitudes and behaviors of younger people who have grown up with personal computers and Internet technology and those born before the Internet era are no longer easy to classify. The rapid adoption of Internet applications and the duration of Internet use by users of all ages suggest that the time may have arrived when it is no longer fruitful to create comparisons between attitudes and habits of individuals born before personal computers were widespread and those born after. Scholars, press and librarians have spent a fair amount of time researching differences in behavior, attitudes and skill sets between " digital natives " —mostly children and young adults born after 1980 and raised with access to computer technology and the Internet—and " digital immigrants " —that is, everyone else. Purchasing behaviors, learning styles, work and communication habits have been studied and analyzed between these two groups. Research suggests that these two groups analyze and process information differently. There is nothing in our research to suggest that this conclusion is not valid, nor that age differences in the use and adoption of Internet tools do not exist. Our research and other current studies do suggest, however, that due to the widespread adoption of digital technologies over more than a decade, the behaviors and attitudes of these two technology generations are beginning to converge—that many digital immigrants are now fully indoctrinated into the culture. Since the publication of the OCLC membership report Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources in 2005, usage of many Internet activities has grown substantially in the three countries surveyed in both 2005 and 2007—Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Search engine use has Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World 1-1 Nearly 90% of the total general public have used the Internet for four or more years. Over 50% of the total …