Week Four Reflection

Straight to the chase here, we read a book.

These two random guys, Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, decided they were going to write a book called “Verified” to help us “navigate the world and all of its little schemes.”

Supposedly there is some major controversy on the web where there are “false” articles out there and we need to know how to distinguish a “good” article versus a “bad” one. I think these guys are full of hockey shit, don’t they understand everything on the internet is real? Yes, even a squirrel-tarantula hybrid.

Okay, but in all seriousness, there is a lot of idiotic stuff on the web, along with articles that are designed to look smart, but may contain false information. Theses two very educated authors, who also won a noble peace prize for this book, designed a very distinct way of deciphering between articles that are containing the truth, partial truth, and nothing in relation to what truth may be.

I leave you with their masterpiece (found in chapter 1), their baby, the reason they might’ve won a cool chunk of gold — SIFT.

S — stop, and ask yourself what you really might know about what you are about to read before you read it.

I — investigate the source that the article is coming from, or leaning on to make its point, whether that is their direct company, or a neighboring company that they used to back there sources. (I am using company as a loose term to define anyone outside of where the author works from.)

F — find coverage. Provide evidence with other sources that will help back the previous story’s accusations or major claims.

T — trace the major quote, claim or media back to its origin.

Don’t worry, there is more to just one riveting acronym to keep you here, because they must’ve had a fun time with this one. In chapter two you quickly discover this thing called CRAAP. Makes the ten year old in me chuckle, but in all seriousness, it really does.

CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose. This quite helpful design is meant to debunk one wonderful little thing the web decided to birth — cheap signals.

Signals are observable elements that we as consumers make judgements on before we even see it. For instance, a catchy headline might bring you right in since you the tagline indicated a bomb went off, when in actuality, your local moron stepped on a bottle rocket and hurt himself.

Making prejudgments on something you technically know nothing about, that my friend is a signal. And these bright little bastards of the internet line them up as little click bait hooks for us hungry fish to feed on — in this case, cheap. The acronym provided above, yes the one that looks like this 💩, allows you to figure out whether the tagline is legit, or if you are going to be diving into a hot steaming pile of nonsense.

After pages of unraveling what CRAAP might look like on the web, and for the books case on paper, we come across chapter 3, our beloved talk of Google. In a simple explanation, not every .org is trustworthy, and not every .com is untrustworthy. There are a lot of situations where nonprofits (.orgs) will use that little handy dandy idea from above, the signal, just as a commoner using a .com might as well. And Google, being google, is merely smarter than we make it out to be.

While yes, Google is a massive search engine providing us millions of possible answers, it is still a computer, and this computer will give you what you feed it — literally. It is important to make sure that you are not wording your questions with a sense of bias because google will munch on it before you can even notice, and will find yourself with a list of reasons as to why you shouldn’t be using blue light glasses simple because you used the word “bad.”

Overall, there is a lot of gunk in the web, and just as one must clean a cobweb from a corner, we must do so as well with the words we choose to digest and regurgitate.