Where will you be getting your information?

Apparently, 2013 is the first year since 1987 to feature 4 different numbers. I have not spent hours pondering this. I merely saw it posted as a meme on Facebook, then mentally ran through some years in my head and agreed that it was not worth my time or energy to break out the pen and paper to categorically prove or disprove this statement.

In the "good old days" when the internet was relatively new, students were told cautionary tales to deter them from using websites such as wikipedia as the source of factual information. But somewhere between "ensure you are using a reliable primary source" and "the moon is really made of cheese" humanity has somewhat lowered its standards when it comes to appropriately vetting information from the World Wide Web. The Australian Taxation Office itself used information provided on Wikipedia to make a draft ruling, much to the amusement of the Wall Street Journal.

This poses the question, are we too trusting of the digital content being presented to us?

Through having a plethora of information at our fingertips, much of which is generally true, have we been lulled into a false sense of security? Or are we naive enough to actually believe that good outranks evil in a search engine? Even worse, have we actually stopped caring about the validity of our information?  

Sure, the internet has given us Google (and where would we be without it, so many bets and fights left unresolved). It has given us Youtube, (and Youtube "sensations" [term used very loosely] such as Justin Bieber, PSY and Rebecca Black...) Facebook (apparently 800 million users can't be wrong), and it has given me Tard - the grumpy cat. And while these are all wonderful, it has also given us trolls, hackers, viruses, MySpace and more (yes, I have shamelessly duckshoved you over to some other guys blog about why the internet is bad...why? well, because I can, the internet allows me to!)

Pre-www, knowledge was valued more because you had to know stuff (not just be able to find it) and it was sometimes only available to those wealthy or fortunate enough to have a set of Encyclopedia Britanicas (...or Funk and Wagnalls for those who could not quite keep up with the Joneses.) Mind you, I am extraordinarily thankful for the advent of electronic journals, articles and reports which I was able to use during my studies. Having said this, we were warned repeatedly to only use academic sources!

So how do you do this? Depending on what information you are seeking, you could use Google Scholar which will search only scholarly articles with citations and referencing. The College of Education at The University of Texas has put together a pretty good tutorial for ensuring a website is reliable. And the best rule of thumb is to be as skeptical on the internet, as you are of telemarketers, or door to door sales people. Consider whose interests are being served by presenting this information, or why the author may have chosen to write a particular article. As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

So the next time you make a bet with your friends, or swear black and blue for a nugget of information to be honest and reliable, make sure you are seeking information from trusted sources. There is already a glut of misinformation out there, so ensure you are not perpetuating it.