Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [27]
The bit-literate user is forever on a media diet and has to be in the habit of saying “no.” There’s too much to consume, and not enough time or attention to spend on even a fraction of it. Every possible source is a “no,” unless it’s proven otherwise in a disciplined tryout. Know what you consume, and why, and be strict about evaluating what else to consume, especially online.
Identifying online sources
As any high school student should know, good research must be built on good sources. For generations, teachers, professors, and librarians have taught their students that you can’t believe everything you read. Some sources are more reliable than others: the Washington Post is more reliable than the tabloids reporting on space aliens, and so on. The same discernment applies to the bit-literate media diet. However, bits often present a new challenge of identifying the source.
It’s usually easy to find the name of any offline source. Many newspapers and magazines print their name and issue date on every page, and TV and radio shows usually identify themselves multiple times during a broadcast. Once the source is identified, the user can decide how reliable the content is. This is different with many online sources, though. When bits arrive—via e-mail or the Web—with partial or no context, it’s easy to overlook the lack of a source and evaluate the content on its own merits. This causes problems.
A good example is the e-mail that gets forwarded endlessly—asking readers to sign a petition, forward the note to friends, or raise an alarm with the government. Either NPR is shutting down, or Congress is about to tax all Internet services, or KFC has stopped using real chicken in its food. Bit-illiterate users often forward these notes without ever noticing that a source isn’t mentioned in the e-mail. E-mails like this look convincing, despite the lack of contextual clues that people are used to seeing in offline sources. The problem wouldn’t occur in the offline world. It’s unlikely, after all, that people would forward along the same claims if they were typed on a blank sheet of paper and tacked to the corkboard above the office water cooler, with no source mentioned.
Much more dangerous are e-mails that pretend to be from a reputable company, like eBay, but actually are intended to defraud the recipient of their credit card number or login information. An example below shows how to spot such messages.
Bit-literate users must know how to evaluate an online source. This may require more than just asking whether the source is reliable; online, it often means first determining what the source is. And that means reading a URL correctly.
How to read a URL
The source of any Web page is identified in the URL, or Web address, displayed in the address bar of the Web browser. It’s also available before you get to a Web page, whenever you’re about to click on a hyperlink to the page. If you hover the mouse pointer over a hyperlink, the Web browser should, in the lower-left of the window, show the URL of the page the link points to. (Many e-mails today also contain hyperlinks to Web pages.)
Each URL contains a “domain” that identifies the company, organization, or person hosting the Web page. Finding the domain thus equates to identifying the source of any Web page. Generally speaking, the domain is whatever appears just after any “http” and “www”, and before the next slash. Here are some example URLs:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html
www.boingboing.net/archive.html
http://www.direct.gov.uk/Homepage/fs/en
goodexperience.com
The domains in the URLs above are nytimes.com, boingboing.net, direct.gov.uk, and goodexperience.com.14
Now for a trickier example: what is the domain of this URL?
http://br.geocities.com/signin.ebay.com/SignIn.html