Day: October 30, 2012

Had an email from someone asking for help making a decision about a particular personal service (health-related). Since my knowledge about the topic is about 40 years out of date, I did what anyone who’s not room temperature would do nowadays: I typed search terms in a search bar and pressed “Enter”.

Sent the first two links that looked as though the articles were well-researched. Got an email back: “Wow! This was helpful. Thanks.”

Now, this isn’t a post denigrating the original asker for not doing a simple search. No, I’m just noting a mindset that doesn’t think first of what a marvelous resource the Internet is, or perhaps feels overwhelmed by the amount of information available and hasn’t spent time and effort learning some filtering techniques (or just doesn’t know how to go about developing those techniques).

I admit, my mind’s a bit odd. I grew up reading a LOT of books. No, more than what you think is “a LOT”–much more. And about half of the books I read were non-fiction, often reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, etc.–yes, read for entertainment), so I developed the mindset of checking references and instinctively look for well-referenced, well-organized, well-thought-out non-fiction. (That doesn’t mean that I write that way here all the time, of course. This is a blog, after all, a place for “the voices in my head” to give a shout out to each other. *heh*)

Add to that too many years in academia, working with my Wonder Woman through a couple of her masters degrees in library/reference/media, and I find it pretty easy to filter out B.S. or even just poorly-sourced, poorly-researched articles on the web.

I wonder how many folks are like my respondent, though–either unable to do such quick web searches (for whatever reason) or who feel daunted by the task of filtering the results?