The Authority of the Printed Page

I have just read another article by an academic lamenting the unreliable quality of much of the material on the Internet (“The New Literacy” by Rhonda Mullins, Concordia University Magazine, fall 2006, pp.12ff.). The article lauds a project Concordia Libraries have undertaken to create a “self-paced interactive online tutorial” to assist students in “finding useful information, evaluating it critically and using it ethically.”

Laudable, and necessary, as this project may be it begs at least a couple of questions. As an irresponsible smart mouth I might poke fun at this use of the Internet to avoid the evils of the Internet. However, being slightly more responsible than that, I must readily concede that those very skills were essential ones to responsible research long before the Internet was even a gleam in the eye of the military establishment. It is not immediately obvious to me that the challenge of exercising such discernment is any more difficult when applied to Internet sources than it is when applied to print ones.

Repeatedly I hear academics and voices from the academic community trumpeting caution. I would be more heartened if more of them were seeking more ways to distribute their peer reviewed articles and scholarly work via the Internet. The vaunted arguments about copyright and being paid for ones work are all ones that can be addressed equally well when it comes to publication on the Internet as when applied to print.

This is not a defence of the quality of what appears on the Internet. However, to merely focus on the unreliable quality of some Internet data is much like criticizing those who get their news from the tabloids - without doing whatever one could to establish a responsible press (but that is another story for another day).