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Good news: Americans trust info on Net less than before
December 21, 2005 | 5:06 am
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By David Rothman
E-books are just a small part of the information offerings on the Net. But those who write or publish them would do well to read a new report from the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School. A snippet:
In year five, the number of users who believe that most or all of the information on the Internet is reliable and accurate continues to decline for the third year in a row.
In 2005, 48.8 percent of users say that most or all of the information online is reliable and accurate–a decline from the peak of 58 percent in 2001. The number of users who believe that only about half of the information on the Internet is reliable and accurate continues to grow for the fourth year in a row.
Well-run blogs with comment areas are one solution to the accuracy issue–I just wish that more people in the mainstream media would Get It and allow reader comments to be linked from news stories. Tightly moderate them if need be, but have ‘em.
Looking ahead, based on my blogging experiences, I hope future e-books will allow embedded discussions. I regard comments as an integral part of the TeleBlog blog, whose traffic shot up when I added this capability. (1) I’m not always right, and the same applies to other contributors, as they themselves would be the first to acknowledge. (2) So often accuracy is in the eyes of the beholder.
Meanwhile I’m actually heartened that more people distrust content on the Internet. This trend is a Very Good Thing, suggesting an increase in critical reading skills involving online content (not that all the literacy news is good).
Perhaps that in turn can boost interest in the concept of a well-stocked national digital library system.
(Report found via MobileRead.)
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Comments:
More than 50 percent of the web now consists of cat blogging. Myriad web pages contain pictures of cats with captions such as “Here is a picture of my cute cat”. However, it is well known that no one can reliably assert ownership of a cat because each cat is an autonomous being that owns itself. Thus, more than 50 percent of the web is inaccurate and unreliable. Corroboration of this insight was provided by researchers at the “Internet Center for the Collection of Unreliable Statistics” which specializes in using ambiguous and half-baked questionnaires.
I am divided as to whether this is good news or not. On one hand, there is very little trustworthy information on the web, or at least nothing that shouldn’t be read with a grain of salt (although I believe the same is true of many “trusted” news/information sources).
On the other hand, if it just means that people will seek out offline sources of information and give up on the Internet as being good only for shopping and porn, that’s not a good thing. What would be ideal is if people looked at multiple sources, whether online or off, before trusting *any* information. The internet is merely a channel, after all, and simply by being online information does not gain or lose any legitimacy. If CNN is to be trusted, it is to be trusted equally whether online or on TV.
I am worried that people are not gaining critical reading skills, but simply learning to mistrust the medium, and put blind faith in what the man on TV tells them.