Evaluating Information

One wonderful aspect about the abundance of information technology available for anyone interested in accessing it, is that one has the opportunity to be a blogger. Here I am on my newly created Blogger blog blogging! Yippee! Being a blogger was always on my short list of experiences I wanted to have. I now have the power to say…anything. Anything I could possibly want to say about anything. As the saying goes, with great power, comes great responsibility.

I love accessing information. But what I really want is good, accurate information that is not saturated with opinions disguised as facts, or false information disguised as facts. I’ll be honest, it drives me nuts that too often I speak with friends and family (intelligent people) who assume everything can be Goggled. To some extent they are correct. Practically everything can be Goggled at this point, but the information which is retrieved is not being evaluated for veracity enough. Just because a document was retrieved, does not make it valuable. I know it is impossible for everyone to do their own research about everything and we have to trust the dispersers of information in almost every case, but what I’m saying is not enough critical thinking is occurring with most people. I know I am being vehement and that tends to attract suspicion. Suspicion is not wrong when it comes to the information age we are currently in--where Web 2.0 (blogs, user generated content) allows anyone to say anything they want whether it is true or not (me for that matter). I think about this everyday and now realize my life’s mission is to encourage critical thinking. Thankfully this is a broad life’s mission and I can carry it with me whichever direction I go in life.

It wasn’t until I was a college freshman, I’m shy to reveal, that I heard the phrase “critical thinking.” I’m not saying I had never thought critically before hearing the phrase. I’m only saying communication about scrutinizing information and researching the sources from which the information came from was explained to me as being extremely important. I don’t recall a ton from my freshman year of college that pertains directly to academia (that was about 10 years ago now), but I do distinctly remember the critical thinking discussion.

To bring this entry full-circle, journalism, Google, and information technology are all great. They allow one to communicate urgent facts that need to be known. However, for as much information that is accessible, there is a great deal of misinformation. So, I hope beginning with you, you will recognize and keep in mind that writers and commentators, whether they are considered experts or not, hold biases and may not be sharing facts, but rather opinions. There are facts—and there are opinions. Opinions can change, but facts cannot.