I had the pleasure recently to hear a talk by Lee Rainie,
director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The folks at Pew do a lot of research and lately have begun to
focus on a group dubbed “screenagers.” These are people between the
ages of 12-20 who spend a lot of time in front of various screens –
televisions, computers, iPods, cell phones and the like. Below are
some of Pew’s findings:

n Seventy percent of American adults now use the Internet. For
teens, it’s 93 percent.

n Here’s one that made a lot of community relations people sit
up and notice: Once somebody gets broadband access, the Internet
becomes more important as a source for news than either newspapers
or TV.

n Newspapers have been fighting the battle for literacy for a
long time. Frankly, TV was taking them to the cleaners. This is the
first time since the 1950s that any medium has displaced TV as a
primary source of news.

n Three quarters of American adults and 63 percent of teenagers
have cell phones.

n More than 55 percent of American teens now have, and use
daily, digital cameras. The images they capture pop up in all kinds
of places: Web pages, iPods, cell phones, PC screensavers and more.
To take that a step farther, content is converging; one format,
many uses.

n Hardware is diverging. The dream of one device for everything
remains a dream.

n And just when you thought you knew where things were going,
get this: 10 percent of Internet users don’t use e-mail – at
all.

n Here’s a watershed: In 2005, laptops began outselling
desktops. It probably won’t go back the other way. This means that
wireless access is far more important than ever, especially to a
generation that really can’t imagine being out of touch.

Members of the Millennial generation, born wired, are sometimes
referred to as “digital natives.” They grew up in the post-Internet
world. Older folks are referred to as “digital immigrants.” Native
or immigrant, the digerati are finding each other on the Internet.
The average broadband user belongs to four communities for an
average of 2.3 years each. These communities might be the kind that
spring up for patient support – somebody going through, or
providing care for, a difficult illness. They might be gaming
communities. They might be Facebook or MySpace, the so-called
social networking sites.

Despite some of the excesses you might have heard about,
two-thirds of social networking site users are pretty selective.
They carefully limit access to their profiles, often to people they
already know. Belonging to an online community does not displace
real communities. In fact, virtual networking seems to lead to
increased actual networking – although sometimes younger people
aren’t quite sure how to cross that bridge.

There are lots of implications in all of this for librarians. At
least on some level, we have to go where the digital natives hang
out. They can’t or won’t find us until we do. And I’ve been giving
a lot of thought lately to working a new generation into more
blended experiences, connecting them to a larger community that
desperately needs their collaborative energy.

Maybe we have something to give them, too.

Jamie LaRue is director for Douglas County Libraries. LaRue’s
Views expressed in this column are his own.