Facts are Facts and if They Aren't, Click Away

The first thing I did this morning was open up my computer and get on the Internet. I didn’t even bother to get out of bed first. Now, I don’t do this every morning, but this morning it was incredibly important because I needed to know if I made the playoffs for Fantasy Baseball (I did by the way). I then checked out CNN to check the news and then for the fun of it checked out Fox News to see what their “slant” on the news was. I realized in that moment that the only time I ever know what’s going on in the world is when I read about it online. I haven’t watched the news on TV or read a newspaper since I moved to Boise. Yet, because of the Internet I’m a relatively well informed person. I was immediately reminded of this week’s reading (well, maybe not immediately, but I was reminded nonetheless).
How do we know that what we read online is fact? Look at the Onion, if you didn’t know that everything on the website was satire (or you were a complete idiot) you could take the information presented as fact. Imagine the danger of a person that used the Onion as a basis of knowledge. What if that was someone’s concept of knowing? Wienberger says, “Philosophers have told us for a couple of millennia that knowing is the highest of human mental activities, but that’s because you don’t become a philosopher unless you’re interested in getting past the mere opinions of those around you to what’s truly worthy of belief” (203). How can we do this on the Internet? The beauty of the Internet is that it can be used by just about everyone. The problem with the Internet is also that it can be used by anyone. That means that by merely searching a simple question, we have the potential of being confronted by literally infinite answers from infinite sources.
I can remember being in sixth grade and being chastised for using an Internet source for a paper I wrote. I was told to never do that again. And I didn’t after that for many years. I mean you don’t find facts on the Internet, you can only find them in books, right? Years later I was told that I could use Internet sources, but never to find them using Google. Google couldn’t bring up academically credible work. Only academic search engines could do that. A couple years after that I was told Google could be used, but it was only the articles that ended in .edu that were credible. And that’s where I am today. I only use sites that end in .edu. Not because I think I have to, just because it’s a less of a headache.
I wonder, though, who decided this? Who decided that the websites launched by colleges were somehow more credible than the site launched by the guy next door that lives in his parents basement? I think the issue here is that people, for some reason, seem to view the Internet as some high tech monstrosity that plots to destroy rational thought instead of what it is, a man-made treasure of information. At some level we are all rational people (and if we aren’t, somebody is hopefully trying to help us) who have a reasonable grasp on what is and isn’t good information. We should doubt ourselves and we shouldn’t let that doubt cloud up online information.
Wikipedia is perhaps the best example of this. Anyone in the world can contribute to the wealth of knowledge housed in this matrix. Does it mean that all the information on the website is fact? No, but where else can one follow links and get from Roger Clemens to South Park? Where else is that knowledge just a click away? It is up to use to funnel out the garbage and find the information we seek. Before I write any paper I always go to Wikipedia first. It helps me to get a grasp of the keywords I need for any given paper. I don’t cite Wikipedia, I just use it as a foundation of knowledge that I later verify with the academic overlords. And where can they be found? Well, with any Wikipedia article there are about twenty citations. And usually at least five of them are from academically credible sources and usually those articles have the exact same information.
The Internet is man-made, and so it must be approached as such. We have an idea of what is and is not fact. We must remember that as we search the web for information. And at the slightest doubt, we can just open a new tab and verify the information.