Shelf Life: Information Overload

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Even for young people who grow up with gadgets, knowing how to upload videos or maintain a blog doesn’t translate to information literacy. “Of course [college students] use Google,” Vaidhyanathan writes, “but not very well—just like my 75-year-old father.”

Using search engines and databases fluently, and knowing how to find, filter, and assess accurate information, are skills that must be taught, by a parent, teacher, friend, or librarian. “This generation may surf the Net, but that does not mean that they think about how, why, and what they are doing,” write media studies teachers Barry Duncan and Carol Arcus for the Toronto-based magazine Education Forum (Winter 2009).

Take search engines. They can be powerful research tools—or they can drive you straight to the sites that are most aggressive and adept at playing the search engine optimization game. A Google search for “nuclear energy” won’t give you a well-rounded group of sources that are pro, con, and neutral—it will return a Wikipedia page at #1; the slick, “clean energy” home page of a nuclear industry lobbying firm at #2; and a cheesy-looking U.S. Department of Energy informational site for kids at #3. You have to get past three or four pages of results in order to get a taste of the surging debate that swirls around this topic. Information literacy is a liberal arts graduation requirement at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which makes the school a rarity, says Thomas Eland, coordinator of its information studies program.

“These students are really bright people, and when you push them to critically analyze the sources, they just don’t know,” Eland explains. “It’s amazing how much people just take in, and really don’t have the tools to critically unpack it, to understand the structures of media production and whose interests are being promoted. . . . It tells me a lot about why the public can be manipulated at so many different levels by advertisers and politicians.”

Even champions of independent media tend to forget that the way we find information online is governed by private companies, not benevolent librarian types who want to unite us with the precise, accurate data we seek.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print