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Is it any more or less reliable than any other medium? |
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The World Wide Web - A Brief History The World Wide Web (WWW) was conceived by Tim Berners Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland and began in 1989. By 1993 only 80 web sites existed around the world and it was not until the lifting of a ban on commercial activities on the Internet, in conjunction with the introduction of a Web browser called Mosaic, that the idea of web sites really began to take off. At the end of 1994 there were 10,000 servers and 10 million users and the WWW became a hot topic of debate as governments across the world grappled over the contentious issues that the Web presented such as national security, authoring, copyright and the spread of pornography. There are now more than 1,000 new servers each day and what was once the domain of the physics community, universities and the military is now very much at the heart of disseminating knowledge, information and technology to millions and millions of people across the globe. Reliability
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While this represents a distinct advantage in using the Web as a research tool, it does also present a number of problems especially to users unfamiliar with the more sophisticated search techniques. Ironically one of the main problems I find with using the Web to conduct research is that the sheer volume of content can lead to a sense of being overwhelmed. Rather than the frustration of being unable to locate sufficient information, one is bombarded by too much. Just how reliable the Web is as a source of information
depends on a number of factors many of which it shares with every other
form of information dissemination:
Judging the reliability of any medium is contingent upon the individual's perspective and therefore personal bias and preference will play a part in how reliable individuals perceive the Web to be. For example, for someone like me brought up on text books and hard copy, I have a natural tendency to place more credibility on what I read in that medium than something I might find on the Web. Younger people, however, who grow up with the Web as a childhood companion will no doubt place a greater emphasis on the reliability of that medium because they will have established |
a degree of trust and rapport with the medium. Because of superior skills in navigating the Web to obtain information, they will also develop a sense as to what they can trust as reliable and what they can discard as being suspect. The Moon Landing - Fact or Fiction
What struck me immediately upon using the web to undertake research into the issue was the enormous amount of information suggesting that the whole episode was indeed a hoax. My first reaction was "Holy Mackeral, there really are a lot of crackpots out there obsessed by conspiracy theories." Literally thousands and thousands of web sites dedicated to the idea that NASA had "mooned America" by staging a fake landing in a studio in the Nevada Desert rather than the surface of the moon. Claim after claim of prop-like space rocks with "Hollywood" letters on them, divergent shadows produced by arc lights and no stars ever showing in any photographs coming from the moon. And what of the fluttering U.S. flag in a breezeless environment. Fascinating stuff!! |
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