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Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you talking about? There is no such thing as a "digital generation."

In the introduction to his book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (Macmillan) last year, Jeff Gomez posits that young Americans constitute a distinct generation that shares a sensibility: resistance to the charms of printed and bound books. Gomez, who has been a sales-and-marketing director for a number of global publishers, has written a trade book whose title and thesis demands that we ignore it. Alas, I could not.

"The needs of an entire generation of 'Digital Natives' — kids who have grown up with the Internet, and are accustomed to the entire world being only a mouse click away — are going unanswered by traditional print media like books, magazines, and newspapers," Gomez writes. "For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time."

When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes. And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the "kids today" or "this generation believes" argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all....