reflection

Accessing information today is not quite the grueling process it was roughly twenty years ago. If you wanted to retrieve some info about a certain subject, you were forced to make a trip to the library, make phone calls, interviews, etc. In modern society however, the Internet is virtually accessible to almost anyone, allowing individuals to acquire any bit of information they want at the click of a mouse.

Search engines on the Internet today are more popular than any book or encyclopedia’s found in libraries. Venturing to the library for a day of research has turned into sitting in your computer chair and ‘book-marking’ the most useful sites. Though we rely on Google and Yahoo to answer all our questions, the legitimacy of these sources is always up for argument.

Despite how easy search engines have made researching, there is much more to finding legitimate information than just clicking the first link offered. No matter how authentic a webpage make look, one can never base the credibility of the information they are taking on the look of a web page. Finding credible sources takes more time and effort than we like to typically think.

Because of the fact virtually anyone can go on the Internet and post something, it should come to show how easy it is to put anything up online. With the new craze of “blogging”, it allows for almost any member in society access to post anything they want online. Wikipedia has been most criticized for the credibility of their information posted. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that allows anyone with access to a computer to post information on any given topic. Because of this, teachers and students alike have heavily scrutinized Wikipedia.

When searching for information via Internet, it is crucial to put extra time into finding credibile sources. On-line libraries and archives are now available to students within colleges and universities, and even some high schools. As a journalist, having credible sources is of the utmost importance. Using the information obtained today, I now know how to be much more aware of what I’m researching, and to scratch the surface and dig deeper into the story. Though things have become much easier on our generation in terms of researching, it does not mean we should take it for granted.

This link is from BBC. Goes more into detail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3151595.stm

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