The interesting article on MSNBC.com "Young see 'tech' as organic part of life," is about how only a handful of 8-24 year olds think of technology as a concept or use terms like social networking. It doesn't mean they aren't using technology or social networking tools. Quite the opposite, it means they use it so much that it is ingrained in their lives and they have ceased to think of these things as "technology."

The article likens talking to kids about technology and their lifestyle today as to talking to kids in 1980 about the role the telephone played in their social lives. It has always been there since they were born, they don't know a world without it.

I have already begun to see this on a personal level.

One day my 4 year old son hopped on to my desktop computer when I wasn't looking. I turned around and asked him what he was doing it and he responded very sincerely, "Checking my email. I have to check my email." Of course he doesn't have an email account and he can only spell his name, but he has grown up in a time where checking one's email is as common as getting on the phone and calling somebody. To him email isn't technology, it is just something you do on the computer.

This mind set isn't necessarily limited to the youth. While on a recent vacation to Boulder, CO my husband and I used GoogleMaps and the Internet to navigate and plan our itinerary. The hotel had a free business center for guests and each night we printed off the various maps to our destinations. We lamented that we didn't have TomTom or some other portable GPS to help us out when we decided to stray from the map and the itinerary. It wasn't until we were reminiscing about past family trips did I remember everything my mom used to do to plan our great excursions. My mom used to spend months planning family trips by getting AAA TripTiks and lots of visitor bureau pamphlets. There was no checking out web sites or getting reviews on local restaurants. We had become so accustomed to using GoogleMaps and the Internet, that we ceased to think of it as technology and were actually wishing we had a newer technology.

I think the same can be said of library technology. There was day when I had to go to the card catalog or the big microfilm reader to find a book. I had to look in the volumes of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature to find a few articles on a topic. Now a lot of things are online and we have come to expect it. I once had a librarian tell me that he didn't see why he should convert his card catalog to an online catalog because none of his users were asking for an online one. (This was only 2 years ago.) My gut response was to squeal, "They aren't asking for one because they probably expect that you have one!"

Someday some of the very social networking tools we are looking at will be ingrained in ourselves and our profession that we will forget that they were ever considered technology. We will be obsessing about some other new technology.