Link to July 29 New York Times article, "So-Called 'Digital Natives' Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows".
Excerpt: "In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.
That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.
This is old news, really. In the late 1990s, Abby Loomis, UW-Madison's former (now retired) campus coordinator for Library and Information Literacy Instruction, talked about the concept of "shoehorning", whereby students figuratively cram the top results of a Google search into their selected research topics.
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