Catshanghai

I once overheard a semi famous drum and bass DJ called Sev talk about keeping it real when he was giving an interview to a lifestyle magazine at a Bristol cafe sometime in the spring of 2003. The phrase made me snigger, because it struck me that asserting your authenticity so emphatically was a clear giveaway that you were less than the real article. That was in a different time and place, but the phrase has stuck with me as has the wish to find real, honest voices wherever they appear in books, music, films and news media.

The Internet makes the quest for truth less certain. Anyone who has read or listened to Andrew Keen’s the Cult of the Amateur (See this Amazon link) may sympathise with his rant that anyone is free to publish lies, mistakes and distortions on blogs, forums or podcasts. He argues that the Internet has been reduced to an echo chamber of gossip where rumour is picked up and spread within hours, even minutes. I do not agree with Andrew Keen’s tone that lay people should leave self expression to well trained experts, but I accept that there is a lot of content on the Internet that is misleading, deceitful, nasty and essentially useless.

I am not going to get into the question of how to block dishonest and inappropriate content, because the most important issue is how to be able to find the truth from all the content that is out there given that much of it is false. This is where we need to rely on a systematic process that checks the validity of the websites and sources we look at. Alan November of Novemberlearning.com has devised an excellent framework that makes the process of checking websites very clear and thorough. Here are all the steps that you should go through when checking information on the Internet. Alan November calls this process information literacy.

R – Read the Web Address
You can find out just by looking at the web address or URL. Anyone can buy a .com or .org address, but a website ending in .gov or .gov.uk will have been setup by a national government, which should hopefully be more reliable. Universities also have their own extensions at the end of a web address. UK universities have addresses ending in .ac.uk and their US counterparts end in .edu.

E – Examine the Content
Here are a few questions to ask when looking at the information on a webpage or site:

1. Is the information on the website useful for your topic?
2. Is the site current? Do you know when it was last updated?
3. Do you think the information is accurate or does it have obvious mistakes in names, dates and places?
4. Are the facts different from information you have found elsewhere?
5. Is the site trying to sell you something?
6. Are there obvious signs of bias?
7. Has the site changed over time? Go to www.archive.org and check the history of the site on the Wayback machine

A - Ask About the Author
Go to www.easywhois.com to find out who owns or wrote the site and do some background checks on them using some different search engines.

L – Look at the Links
Check the links to other sites to see if your source is using biased or faulty information and find out who is linking to this page by using the link command in the Alta Vista search engine.

eg link:http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus shows what sites are linking to http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus

It would take a great deal of work to check all these factors every time you looked up a fact or read a news story on the Internet. I recommend you ask two or three questions of every source you read. If you see that something does not look quite right then it is a good idea to go through the REAL process in more detail. It is helpful to have the point of view that anything you look at on the Internet, on the television, in books or even in newspapers may contain errors or have a biased agenda.