Learning to deal with information

In the 21st century, information is cheap. Or is it? I have written several times on this blog that it is a naive illusion to think of the internet as a democratic provider of information. Moreover, the simple provision of information is not equivalent to people being well informed.

The availability of information on the internet is not democratic but, if anything, anarcho-capitalist. If you have the money to pay people who know something about search engine optimization, and others to spam links to your site wherever they won't be immediately deleted, you can pimp up your website's ranking dramatically. Even Google's PageRank algorithm itself is clearly not democratic: it gives more weight to a link from a site that has itself more links. That's what makes it so powerful and so useful. Sure, we all profit from this clever ordering of information. I'm certainly not complaining about it. It's just not democratic and shouldn't be sold as democratic since not everybody's voice has the same weight. Google itself does smartly not call the algorithm itself "democratic" but writes that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web." Ohm, which democratic nature are we talking about again? But maybe more important, Google's PageRank also doesn't tell you anything about the quality of information you obtain. That the voices of the wealthy have more impact is hardly surprising, and merely a reflection of what has been going on in the media and news press for a long time.

Now one could of course argue that it's up to me to just go through all the hits that my search brought up and find the best piece of information. But as a matter of fact, most people don't do that. I usually don't do it either. And that's not even irrational, because scanning through all the hits that one gets on a query is very time-intensive and the result rarely justifies the effort. Thus, most people will skim maybe the first 20 hits, if at all, and conclude that they've gotten a fair cross-section of what there is to know about the topic. That's the part of the information that is "cheap." Everything else, for example checking sources, becomes increasingly costly in terms of time and effort. And since most websites don't list their sources, there's few shortcuts to that. What is left is that whoever dominates the "cheap" information does, for all practical purposes, dominate the information market. The only cure for that is information literacy.

The other day, I read an interesting article by Mark Moran. Moran is CEO of a Web publisher that offers free content and tools that teach students how to use the Web effectively. He writes:

"[A]s the founder of a company whose mission is to teach the effective use of the Internet, I have pored through dozens of studies, and recently oversaw one myself, that all came to the same conclusion: Students do not know how to find or evaluate the information they need on the Internet.

In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: "I type a question." When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were "if it sounds good" or "if it has the information I need." Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations."

I find this seriously scary! As I have expressed in my earlier post Cast Away, the passing on of knowledge to the next generation is one of the most essential ingredients to continuing progress. How are people supposed to make informed decisions if they can't tell what the relevant information is to begin with? Where does that leave our political systems? But then I read the following:

"Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. [...]

Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace."

Wise words, eh? Guess where that's from? Guess, don't Google! It's a press release from the White House. No, really. It's an announcement for the "National Information Literacy Awareness Month" that was last year in October, which somehow passed me by. While recognizing a problem isn't the same as solving it, it is certainly a good first step. Let's hope that other nations will follow that example, there's clearly hope. Yes, we can do it! Indeed, there is more hopeful news today: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism some days ago published new data comparing the news coverage on blogs to that in the traditional press. Here's an interesting number: only 2% of news in the traditional press are about science and technology. But on the blogs, it's 18%.