Categories and Exceptions

Siva has some typically insightful things to say on the myth of the digital generation.   There are, of course, broad generalizations that can always be made about classes of people.  And humans being love to classify (I was reminded the other day of one of our IT guy's favorite tag lines: "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.")  One might suppose that librarians are more prone to that than people in some other professional groups.

So we can classify by race or nationality (although one of the more intriguing things about Davies' Europe is how he represents ethnicity and nationality throughout Europe's history as being driven much more by cultural and political factors than anything intrinsic).  In the US we have red states & blue states and coastal & heartland and urban & rural and so on.  We can divide ourselves in innumerable ways.

But within librarianship, the hot division is generational.  Whether we're bitching about the stodgy, change-averse old boomers who won't get out of the way of the hip, tech-savvy millenials, or desperately trying to turn our libraries into Myspace-listed gaming parlours so as to attract the youngsters whose multitasking brains have been completely rewired by constant exposure to the internet, we seem all too often to fall into the trap of thinking that those very broad generalizations actually speak to some truth about the individuals that we bind into categories.

You'd think we might learn something from the insidiousness of racism -- the pernicious habit of making judgments (usually negative) about someone based solely on their membership in a particular racial group. 

We spent some time on the topic at last week's MLA Board of Directors meeting.     There's been a focus in the association in recent years on encouraging people who are making their first career decisions to consider librarianship, and, in particular, health sciences librarianship.  Within the governance structure itself, there's a focus on figuring out ways to get newer librarians more involved in shaping the direction of the association.   But it is tough to even have those discussions without the language pushing us toward talking as if all of librarianship can be gathered into two groups, separated strictly by age.

Whatever truth there may be in broad generalizations about differences between generations, it would be well to remember what those generalizations tell you about the individual in front of you, whether that person be 27 or 57.

Nothing.