Throughout the years have the validity of the information found on the Internet been under discussion. Mostly have the information been discussed in the negative term. E.g. Referencing to information on Internet in a report has been regarded as a un-trustful source. The question is now if these preconceptions soon can begin to alter? And are the world and we ready for this? My answer for this is perhaps (or as in Swedish ”Nja”).
What measures quality? Is it by what one person with a higher authority (e.g. Professor) has written in a published book or is it by what someone has written on Slashdot with a high quality score? This question cannot, and will not, I answer but what I can say is that they both have their pos and cons.
One negative aspect with social media is that we cannot in all cases know that the person writing something actually is who he says he is. A person with authority is known to be more trusted than a person with lesser authority. By stating that someone in authority (e.g. Professor, moderator, well esteemed user) writes a statement, theory or an idea will be a powerful way of influencing people in making it more believable. Also in these cases when people on e.g. Slashdot starts to write positive comments to a text will result in that social confirmation will be activated within us to agree with something that we are uncertain of. This effect will be even greater if someone in authority also writes the comments.
Even though that the same influencing power will affect us when reading a book or a printed article, we can with more assurance know that the author is who he says he is. We can probably also on the supposition that the book has been revised by other knowledgeable people.
On the contrary, the same arguments can be used to assure the validity of what is written on Slashdot’s homepage. If the user comments in majority are positive or negative will be a good way of getting an idea if something is to be considered true or false.
In the end, we will have to use our own good judgment when assessing if something written on Internet is to be believed or not. But since we as humans are so easily influenced by other so will this never be easy, whether it is published on Internet or in a book.
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2 comments:
The last sentence of your article is very inspiring to me. In the social media time, it is seems that people are more and more independent with each other especially when we are doing the think. But the fact may be at the opposite direction, since we are strongly influenced by what we saw or read not only for those content published on the web but also the comments followed by them. We are influenced by them regarding to our subjective judgment. And the extent to which people believe in the ones with authority like you mentioned above, say professors for example, may not as that large as we though before. Since the one of the biggest features of social media is its sociological characteristic, which make the virtual communities online being more like a real social circle where trusted relationship plays more important role than authority. So it is highly likely that the comments from our trusted or respected ones rather than a strange authority would influence our subjective judgments much more. Again, the evaluation of information quality have some problems emerged, since people may not give the objective comments on some certain content form their favored ones. But I would be an optimistic here, since still people are playing kind of social game here, so the responsibility is being an invisible but important factor which may help people to make the right decision when their thoughts may also influence others’.
As you say, in the end it is up to oneself to judge if we believe something is true or false. But as the situation is today this may not be possible in every situation. Take the example of the problem with using references from Internet in reports that you had in the beginning of your text. Many times it is hard to judge if the information you find on the Internet really counts as reliable in the teachers point of view since we all can judge things differently.
I can admit that I have problems trusting information taken from for example Wikipedia in a report. Maybe not because I think the information is incorrect but rather that the source of the information does not feel trustworthy. I can not trace this information as easily as the author of a book or an article.
But hopefully this fine line of judging what is true and what is false will become easier in the future.
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