The future of the Inter­net as a cred­i­ble source of infor­ma­tion is under threat due to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of spam and inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion online, sug­gests Howard Rhein­gold, propos­ing that the most effi­cient way to counter this wor­ry­ing trend is for “a great many peo­ple [to] learn the basics of online crap detec­tion and begin apply­ing their crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties en masse and very soon”.

To start, Rhein­gold offers what could be called a com­pre­hen­sive intro­duc­tion to online crap detec­tion (crit­i­cal think­ing). I was won over by the introduction:

The answer to almost any ques­tion is avail­able within sec­onds, cour­tesy of the inven­tion that has altered how we dis­cover knowl­edge — the search engine. Mate­ri­al­iz­ing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part — the part a machine can do. The real dif­fi­culty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accu­rate bits from the mis­info, dis­info, spam, scams, urban leg­ends, and hoaxes. “Crap detec­tion,” as Hem­ing­way called it half a cen­tury ago, is more impor­tant than ever before, now that the automa­tion of crap­cast­ing has gen­er­ated its own word: “spamming.”

Sug­gest­ing that “Who is the author?” is the root ques­tion, the arti­cle con­tin­ues with links to essays and tools to aid in edu­ca­tion and online research­ing before offer­ing this on how impor­tant the issue is:

To me, the issue of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy could be even more impor­tant than the health or edu­ca­tion of some indi­vid­u­als. Fun­da­men­tal aspects of democ­racy, eco­nomic pro­duc­tion, the dis­cov­ery and use of knowl­edge might be at stake. Some of the biggest prob­lems fac­ing the world today seem to be far beyond the abil­ity of any indi­vid­ual or com­mu­nity, or even the whole human race, to tackle. But the noise death of the Inter­net is some­thing we can take on and win.

via @finiteattention, @bfchirpy