Send An Email, You Say?

There are many expectations we place upon digital natives.  From the outside looking in, it appears all young people should just know how to do everything when it comes to technology.  After all, they've had digital overload in their lives since birth.  This generation can navigate through their cell phones and download the latest and greatest new app like they are wired for such tasks.  Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and even Instant Messaging have become so commonplace, that I’m sure I sound old suggesting that these apps might still be relevant to a person under the age of twenty.  Surely, in the time it takes me to write this, ten more apps will hit the cyber highway straight to a tablet near you.  So, it seems almost impossible that our high school students would have missed one of the basic functions of attaching a document to an email and sending it along to a teacher or a potential employer.  Impossible it is not.  It is an absolute fact.

When we think about it, though, this really isn’t that strange.  Electronic mail (email) didn’t surface until about 1993, and it really didn’t hit mainstream America for another decade.  This generation of high school students would have been in their infancy when email was the in thing for instant communication.  Oh, the times they have changed! Now, the in thing is so in, that most of us over the age of forty likely don't even know what it is.  One absolute that never changes, though, is that teenagers like to be in the lead when it comes to having what's new--the latest and greatest.  It stands to reason, therefore, that the way people communicated electronically in 2003 is not going to be the most savvy way to communicate in 2016.

It is not surprising, then, that many of the invisible tasks librarians do today is to connect the youngest patrons with our old school ways of doing things, so that they can communicate with multiple generations of users.  Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing students embrace such tools as Google Drive or Drop Box to house documents and easily retrieve them from any computer, smart phone or tablet; alas, who is taking them back two steps to navigate the skills they need to engage with people outside their peer group?  It is not an exaggeration to say that a half dozen times per week I am showing my high school students how to attach documents to emails to send to their teachers, college admissions offices or potential employers.  In fact, about once a month, I have a reason to, first explain what it is, then show students how to send a facsimile.  (Can you say 1970s?) Although there are more efficient, cutting-edge technologies to expedite these tasks, we will always need people who can show students how to bridge the generations together to make sure no one gets lost in this ever-changing, digitally-driven world of communication.