Sarah Ford is doing research on bloggers’ attitudes about what is public and what is private online. Here’s what she says:
Comments closedThat’s right, the survey is officially live as of ten minutes or so ago. If you’re a “personal blogger”, please fill it out, and pass it on to your friends.
I O.D.ed on millennial generalizations after only three professional conferences and meetings last year and have since consciously avoided sessions about those crazy aliens we’ve spawned. So maybe I’m not educated enough on the topic to have an authoritative opinion. But that doesn’t stop me having a non-authoritative opinion, and here it is: throughout all of history, the younger generation has always been alien.
“But their brains operate differently,” you say.
“How do you know?” I reply. “How many generations of kids have had their brains scanned?”
Well, TCM is playing the 1968 movie “The Impossible Years” right now and guess what, it’s all about how teens are wired differently and how teens and adults are completely incomprehensible to each other. The mother in this film just told the incredulous dad, “And what do you suppose our daughter is doing right now? She’s reading.” Nobody can believe it. They think it’s a miracle. And yes, I said the movie was from 1968.
So the specific differences between adult and kid may differ from year to year and from research study to research study, not to mention from specific adult to specific adult and specific kid to specific kid. But the younger generation is always alien… and this is completely natural.
3 CommentsClasses are done. Now we’re in the “lull” period of reading days (i.e. students doing the research they should have been doing for weeks, panicking a little, and not having time for interlibrary loan… Meanwhile we stay open until 3am and have added reference hours). Finals run Saturday through Monday. And then we’re DONE.
To celebrate that we’ve made it this far, we set up an ice cream sundae bar outside the library last night from 9 to 10 and served gallons and gallons of ice cream (I believe 7 gallons? maybe 8?) to crowds of students. And I have to say, it was the best thing we could have done, both for the students and for ourselves. Students got ice cream (what’s bad about that?) and we got to do something really fun after a long and very stressful day. I started the night grumpy and over-tired, but when I went home I’d almost completely decompressed and could go to bed without dwelling and stewing about the horrible day we’d had. (We even ended up doing a few impromptu research consultations over ice cream, which was interesting and rather unexpected.)
So this weekend will be busy, filled with extra reference shifts and polishing off a manuscript that’s due. But then I hope to figure out what “normal” life looks like, again (and maybe get to some of the blog posts I’ve been meaning to write over the course of the last month and a half).
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