Searching and Finding
The strength and weakness of the Internet as a research source is just how much information there is: a badly-phrased search can drown you in irrelevant, misleading or unreliable results.
The strength and weakness of the Internet as a research source is just how much information there is: a badly-phrased search can drown you in irrelevant, misleading or unreliable results.
The digital age presents us with unprecedented problems when it comes to finding information and making sure that it’s true. Where our first problem used to be getting information, what’s more difficult today is filtering out what we need from what we don’t. In fact, creating and distributing information is now so easy that we can no longer assume that sources have anything to lose by spreading content that’s false or misleading. In essence, today we all have to be our own librarians, researchers and fact-checkers.
Once you’ve found information online – or someone has shared it with you – how do you know if it’s true, or at least credible? In other words, how do you authenticate the information? The Internet is a unique medium in that it allows anyone – not just experts – to write on any topic and to broadcast it to a wide audience.
In fact, half of us pay more attention to who shared a story with us than where it originally came from.[1]
The internet is all about sharing – sharing news, sharing videos, sharing our thoughts and opinions with our friends.
Because social media makes us all broadcasters, we have a responsibility not just to avoid sharing misinformation but to take action when people in our network share it.
One of the hardest things about being a responsible sharer is to be aware of your own biases, the reasons why you might be more likely to believe something without evidence. These are aspects of the way we think that can lead us to accept false statements, reject true ones, or simply not ask enough questions.
February 10th is Safer Internet Day, an event sponsored by Insafe to promote safe and responsible online behaviour. As the Internet becomes a more and more central part of our lives, we are coming to a better understanding of just what risks and opportunities it provides. We are learning, for instance, that youth are less likely to be victimized by adult strangers than by other youth, whether it is in the form of sexual solicitation or online harassment: a recent study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, prepared for the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States, supports other recent research in finding that it is the particular behaviours that some youth consciously engage in that place them at risk -- and that not all youth are equally at risk.