Information about Information

PART 1

      It is strange how confusing living in the information age can be. Real news, fake news. How is it even possible to tell the difference? This week's instruction was centered on just this dilemma. I was pretty excited to learn that there are some specific techniques that can be used to help determine what is reliable information and what is not. My first assignment was to read a fact-check page from the DigiPro project. The topic that caught my attention was, "When did we begin standing for the national anthem?" I am not certain why I expected this article to simply be a history lesson. I was reminded in the introduction that the tradition of standing for the national anthem has a much more political context in US sports, particularly the NFL. Much of this article was primarily informational in nature, and I found it to be quite interesting. However, most of the embedded links led to a page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine stating that the URL had not been archived thus leaving those particular claims unsupported. I felt that the article would have been stronger if the "multiple sources" referred to several times had actually been cited--or at least named. The final paragraph in the article stated that it is not clear why NFL teams switched from waiting out the national anthem in the locker room to standing on field after 2009 but implied the military may have been behind the newly formed tradition. A very brief web search of my own led me to two fact checking sites that refuted this implication. According to Snopes, players always had the option of standing for the national anthem and there is no evidence that "paid patriotism" initiatives required it after 2009. Additionally, Politifact suggests that remaining inside the locker rooms during the national anthem had more to do with timing issues for television networks. The change to be on the field actually only impacted prime time games as players were already on the field during the national anthem during daytime games. It wouldn't seem that the misinformation on this topic would cause any serious problems. However, for an NFL player choosing to kneel during the national anthem for a cause he believes in, accurately representing the facts is very important, both to the cause he represents and his career. 

PART 2

    I have a household of information consumers. Much of the information we consume is for little more than entertainment purposes. However, being able to determine the difference between factual information and misinformation becomes more important as we use that information to learn skills, make purchases, select physicians and make health decisions, and vote in local and national elections. For example, I recently had to select a health specialist to examine an old knee injury. Apparently, over time, that old injury has developed into bone on bone arthritis in my knee. Although I am a candidate for knee replacement, I currently am not experiencing pain. The specialist informed me of my options and left the decision up to me. The problem is, I love to run. There is a great deal of online information regarding knee health and running. I am finding I must sift through a lot of anecdotal recommendations and cures to find good information from reliable sources. I have noticed that there is a great deal of sponsorship in the information available to me. It is helpful to be able to spot sponsored articles and then identify who is doing the sponsoring. I now have a list of reputable fact-checking organizations such as Snopes, Factcheck.org, or NPR Fact-Check to help follow up on any claims that might sound too good to be true and even those that seem accurate. I can also try to find information from sources that have a good reputation for being reliable.

    There are so many sources of information available on the internet. It seems that many are not especially credible. This is where "reading laterally" becomes useful. I don't have to just hope I can figure out which site is good and which is not so good. I can put Google to work and get multiple tabs open to find out what other people and organizations think about the site I am looking at as well as about the author of the article or owner of the site itself. By looking at critiques, commentaries, and reviews from others, I can learn a great deal about the credibility of a site in question.