The 2013 Beloit College Mindset: putting generations a list apart

Every year, Beloit College makes a list of “observations that help to identify the experiences that have shaped the lives—and formed the mindset—of students starting their post-secondary education this fall.” It’s called the Beloit College Mindset List and while they claim this isn’t supposed to make you feel old, if you’re not in the college graduating class of 2013 (born in 1991!), there’s something on this list bound to make you feel like you’re a year away from a hip replacement.

The list of 75 items does a good job of connecting the lives of 19 year olds with that of, say, their parents. The things we had that they don’t and the things they have that we didn’t are intermingled with names and things familiar to all of us; Britney Spears, Mike Tyson, the KGB. And if kids don’t know who The Green Giant is or what Saved by the Bell was all about, they’ve at least heard of them, or come across them in passing. And then there’s this:

4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.

Of all the things on this list, that’s the one that makes me feel an absolute disconnect between the world I knew and the world I know.

In 1989 I worked in the library at our local community college. We had a meeting one day where the director of the library told us he wanted to phase out the card catalog system and start computerizing everything. My heart sank. While I embraced the world of technology and looked forward to a more computerized world, the idea of removing the card catalog from libraries was, in my mind, like removing a heart from a living body. That this generation of college students and all generations after will never know the thrill of using a card catalog saddens me.

Yes, I said the thrill.

Technology is a wonderful thing. Having information readily available at the click of a button is a powerful tool, whether you are doing research for a school project or looking up biographical information on former pro wrestlers (which I did when I kept writing Benoit instead of Beloit). But it’s missing something. It’s missing the feel of the card catalog, pulling out the drawer and thumbing through cards looking for a title or author. It’s missing the best part of research; acting as if you’re on a treasure hunt. Flipping through cards, finding what you’re looking for, writing down the Dewey Decimal number on a scrap of paper (or your hand) and then walking through the stacks of books looking for your treasure. The triumphant feeling when you find the book exactly where it’s supposed to be, then pulling that book off the shelf in victory. Yea, I know there are still libraries with stacks of books, but it’s somehow different now. When I was young, I thought of the library as the place where all the information in the world was stored. It was a revered institution. Now all the information in the world is stored on a series of tubes and wires, all leading to a defaced Wiki page.

Maybe the card catalog will become my generation’s “walked uphill both ways!” When my son complains about a  website not loading up fast enough I can say “Back in my day if we wanted to know who was in goal when the Montreal Canadians won their first Stanley Cup, we’d have to take a bus to the library, go through the card catalog – which meant knowing how things are correctly alphabetized – then we’d find about two books and a magazine with the information we wanted, figure out how to thread microfilm through that damn machine, find our information, take the bus back home, call up our friend – on the rotary phone – and say ‘Told you it was Georges Vezina! Loser!’ We had to work for our superior knowledge!”

And then my son will sigh, roll his eyes and go back to trolling YouTube comments on hockey fight videos.

The only way I can keep my old world from having too great a disconnect to this new world is to embrace all the new fangled inventions today’s kids take for granted, which just makes me realize that maybe my generation with its old fashioned research had it better. We never had to weed through pages and pages of information and figure out what’s good and what’s not because no one ever scribbled misinformation in our card catalogs.