Millennial Generation Characteristics

Libraries wish to market their services and collections to all generations, but the Millennial Generation (born 1980-1996) represents special challenges. Realities of the Millennials are suggested below. Perhaps this article will assist library professionals and marketing/communications managers in learning more about this generation.

• They are a truly distinct cohort that eventually will become larger than the Baby Boom generation. They are special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, and high achieving.



• They live with and believe in rules, feel pressured, are very conventional, are risk averse, and embrace technology.



• They are digital natives in the land of digital immigrants. They have new and different expectations about how to gather and use information.



• They are saturated with media options. Nearly half of the Millennials now have broadband connections in their homes. The “home media ecology” has become much more complex in the past 30 years.



• Their technology is mobile, cell phones, MP3 players and laptops.



• Word of mouth advertising is very powerful.



• In their recent book, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa (2007) found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US 97% own a computer; 94% own a cell phone; 76% use instant messaging; 34% use websites as their primary source of news; 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs. Almost ½ of them download music using peer-to-peer file sharing and 75% of college students have a Facebook account. About 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device, such as an iPod.



• They multi-task. They like to begin a research process by going online and browsing around. They think of librarians as info support, akin to what we think of as tech support. They live in a state of continuous partial attention.



• Millennials often are unaware of or indifferent to the consequences of their use of technology. Copyright violations are a case in point. Over half the Millennials do not care much if the content they are downloading is protected by copyright.



• Their technology world will change radically in the next decade. Computing power, communications power, spectrum power, and storage power are all accelerating. Smart environments (real-world environments) are coming, with chips embedded in door knobs, farm fields, and our clothing.



• The way they approach learning and research tasks will be shaped by their evolving techno-world. It will be more self-directed, more tied to group outreach and group knowledge, and more reliant on group tagging.

ALA TechSource Blog post of CIL keynote address highlights by Lee Rainie from Pew Internet and American Life Project.