“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow. Still, the quote is credited to him on 11,000 web pages.
The quote makes a nice start to this article about truth. If we want to go with truth-by-consensus, we can just say he said it.
Startling, really!
Consider these random events, most of which pertain to the under-25 set — the launching of Cumul.us, a Wiki weather site in which users can collaboratively decide whether it is raining; the release of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, Farhad Manjoo’s exploration of the “cultural ascendancy of belief over fact”; and the addition of “collateral misinformation” on UrbanDictionary.com.
The entry: When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the “error” is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation.
All of these examples are signs of the time. For the Google generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and knowledge in a world of user-generated information saturation?
“We’re losing him!” Chad Stark clicks back and forth between two windows.
Stark is a librarian in Maryland, US. He handles AskUsNow, an online chat open to Maryland residents who need research help.
A few minutes ago, his computer had gone ping. A question, from an anonymous user: “How big do iguanas get?”
“Dude, u r boring me.”
Stark scrolls quickly through several sites.
“U respond slow. Consider taking a typing class.”
More pings.
“If it’s wrong?” is the question that plagues librarians and teachers today.
Wikipedia was found to be only slightly less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica (four errors to Britannica’s every three).
What concerns people like Stark is the fact that, without peer review, it’s so easy to be wrong, and for your wrongness to become the top Google hit and to be repeated by other people who think it’s right.
Andrew Keen calls it “the cult of the amateur” in his book of the same name; Stephen Colbert called it “wikiality”.
Information is about tidbits of data; knowledge is about context.
Joining librarians as trench warriors for truth are teachers, from grade school through college.
Mike Grill, who teaches at a high school in Virginia, US, describes the progression when he makes his students do research.
“At the beginning, their sources will be some crank blog,” Grill says.
For the six-week project, he puts them through detox: limiting their online sources to three, making them use a library.
He accepts Wikipedia as a starting place but encourages his students to think.
Unfortunately, he has had some troubling visits from former students. “They say, ‘Oh, I’ve never been in a library.’”
Not a singular case
Anna Johnson is a university freshman from Iowa, the US, who sympathises with Grill’s students. “I got through my first semester without ever checking out a book.”
But for her second semester, she had the mandatory seminar, which partners each section with a librarian to combat the decline of information literacy.
She finished her paper about homelessness and women that was strong enough to be selected for a writing symposium.
Back in Maryland, Stark accepts another question from a user who wants to know the distance between New Jersey and Venezuela.
Stark asks which cities in New Jersey and Venezuela, explaining that this variable could drastically change the answer.
The user says: “It’s just science homework, dude.” The same patron asks, “In what continent is Venezuela?”
Stark stares at the screen for a second. “This kid doesn’t know where Venezuela is but he managed to log on and use this service,” Stark says quietly.
There is a lot of information out there — it’s overwhelming. You wonder: Who is right? The student who lives online? Or the teacher who thinks books are necessary?
The truth in a user-generated world isn’t so much about the accuracy of information as it is about an appreciation for the intricacies of the search, for understanding that truth can be elusive but the fight for it can be rewarding.
Sometimes, it’s a losing battle.
Snapshot
Some facts about online information literacy:
- 2,340,000: number of articles on the English-language Wikipedia.
- 120,000: number of articles on Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
- 58: the percentage of survey respondents who said they used search engines to solve problems relating to the government.
- 34: the percentage who actually contacted the government.
- 36: the percentage of adults who use Wikipedia as a regular source of information.
- 13: the percentage that said information online was more accurate than off-line information.
- 11: number of times the Wikipedia entry for “truth” was altered, in a one-week period.
- 16,000: results found for the Google search “HIV does not cause AIDS”.
- 9,000: approximate hits for “the moon landing was staged”.
- 1: hit for “What is a primary source and why is it important?”
Write in: How true is information on the Net? How much do you trust the information sourced online? Is it as reliable as a library? Where do you find your information from? Tell us at letter2editor@gulfnews.com
