In the old days, when college students trekked 20 miles in the snow to the nearest library with a manual typewriter in tow, they didn’t have to submit their ingenious philosophical musings to Turnitin.com. Oh, but how the world has changed.

This year, like none before it, is quickly making clear how the Information Age has transformed the lives of the Facebook Generation, which traces its lineage to the Baby Boomers and Generation X. Indeed, the college community on Facebook has become a microcosm for the fast-paced, interconnected and increasingly digital world of today’s university students.

More information than ever before is now at our fingertips, and it is available instantly. Have a question? Google it, and find the answer. Or, more likely, find 237,000 potential answers. Learning, previously confined to traditional instruction, is now taking place organically and incessantly, as knowledge expands with every news text alert, every e-mail and every podcast. At the same time, nonacademic aspects of life are increasingly entering the classroom: Who hasn’t forgotten to silence their cell phone once in a while or logged on to AIM during a lecture?

If anything, though, today’s students are not necessarily smarter. Digital resources have brought access to countless banks of knowledge at low, if any, cost, but they have also made news and information easier to organize and censor.

As general readership of newspapers quickly falls to the dominance of specialized Internet news sources (the college-age population gets more of its news from the Internet than any other group, according to polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press), consumers have almost unlimited power to shape and cherry pick the news they consume. Indeed, it is easier today than ever to find only the news one wants to hear, without the rubbish that one does not.

Even as Google competes against other Internet companies to digitize the libraries of world’s universities, the role these collections play in the daily lives of students have changed. Indeed, so has the very nature of knowledge.

In recent days, many headlines have made a ruckus over alleged editing of Wikipedia entries by congressional staffers for political gain: The lesson, familiar to most students, is that no knowledge is absolute. If each of the 237,000 Google results offer a slightly different answer, and if their ranking is determined by a mathematical algorithm, who can blame us for our cynicism about the world, and our opposition to the value systems — be they moral, cultural or literary — older generations attempt to impose on us?

The lesson of the Information Age is that viewpoint colors the presentation and framing of knowledge. And based on comments posted on Ratemyprofessor.com, students are keen to this. “No matter what you do, it’s wrong if it’s not his way,” wrote one disgruntled student about a UCSD political science professor. No longer is “his way” the only way, even if “he” is the world’s expert on the subject.

This healthy skepticism has not stopped at the university walls, either; in polls, college-age folk report less regard and trust for the mainstream media, and many more find themselves unsatisfied with the two major political parties.

For the Facebook Generation, romance has gone digital, too. In high school, we used to pass notes during class. Now, we run home to check the “relationship status” of that cute girl or guy in our math class. Will they be “single,” “in a relationship” or the frustrating and ambiguous “it’s complicated”? The ambitious can even ponder their potential compatibility by evaluating posted music tastes and political leanings, all without the awkwardness of that first date.

Perhaps it won’t be long before the “cancel relationship” option becomes the online proxy for breaking up.

As with any change, there will always be winners and losers — and the losers are crying foul. In this case, they are major content providers who suddenly find their monopoly over information a thing of the past. For the music industry, which can no longer pad records with filler tracks, the answer has been lawsuits, including several dozen against UCSD students. For textbook manufacturers, who can no longer justify inflated prices in face of competition from their own international editions, the answer has been bundling materials with costly junk and putting pressure on universities to limit Internet alternatives, as seen in the current controversy over eReserves.

If past social revolutions are any guidance, they will not be successful.

It may be the Facebook Generation, but Facebook is simply an emblem of a bigger trend in the expansion of information and modes of communication. For those opposed to change because it is simply different — like, for example, when religious fundamentalists weep over the downfall of traditional “values” represented by Internet pornography — the subsequent changes in lifestyle may not be much to celebrate. But isn’t there a Facebook group for people like that?

For better or for worse, college students are living the avant-garde changes of tomorrow. These changes may be good, bad or — most likely — a little bit of both.