The purpose of this paper is to explore two types of Net-generation practitioners – writers and makers born in the 1980s – and how they describe their professions and their information practices.
The authors distinguished the information practices of Net-generation writers and makers from those of their older counterparts and then examined the contextual factors associated with the shared meanings in each community of practice, by interviewing a total of 14 participants, 7 writers and 7 makers, and qualitatively analyzed the resulting data.
First, the professional boundaries perceived by Net-generation practitioners are more blurred than those of their older counterparts. Second, they rely on life experience, online platforms and print for their sources of information and inspiration. Third, Facebooking and the use of filter bubbles are among the most popular information practices. Fourth, diversity, uniqueness, multimodal, participatory and self-media are keywords in their content creation and information produced. Fifth, connectivity (connecting people and resources) and collective intelligence (emphasizing how expertise is collected and distributed) are key themes associated with these digital natives. Sixth, the authors also identified and compared differences between these two groups.
The study limitations include the small sample size of each practitioner group and the fact that the methods are dependent on the participants’ abilities to describe their information practices.
This study is among the first to focus on the characteristics of digital natives and their information practices. It provides a tentative framework for further exploration and contributes to our initial understanding of this topic.
