Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness

I first heard Tara Brabazon speak at LILAC (Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference) in 2008. It was an unforgettable experience. Eschewing PowerPoint and overheads, she spoke in an engaging, humorous and often confrontational style, peppering it with snatches from Star Trek and a random shout to ensure everyone was awake! Even more impressive, though, was the content of her presentation. Her arguments in favour of a more thoughtful and reasoning critical approach to what we then called the Google Generation were very cogent, and flew against what some in the profession were heralding as a new, literate and tech-savvy generation. These points were first laid out in The University of Google: education in the post Information Age (Ashgate, 2007). This new work takes those concerns a step further.