Waiting for the (Digital) Barbarians

摘要

Constantine Cavafy's 1904 poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" provides a useful metaphor for where libraries now find themselves. Decked in our professional finery, we wait for the digital natives to arrive. The danger is that by waiting and not acting,we will, like Cavafy's senators, find that the barbarians never come, because they have passed us by as being irrelevant. It has been almost a decade since Marc Prensky first argued the then-controversial case for digital natives. As with climate change, the growing weight of evidence is showing him to be correct. Recent figures from the Childwise study (2009) in the United Kingdom (which many will find depressing) reveal the following about 9-year-olds: 40 percent have Internet access in their room; They enjoy six hours of "screen time" each day, with 1.7 hours spent online; Only three-fourths of them read for pleasure, down from 84 percent two years ago; They are abandoning print and paper and communicating in a completely different way; and They multitask.