A.R.L

Everyone knows that to complete a project research is required, but it seems overwhelming with the availability of online information, where do we start? ‘Network literacy means recognizing that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is that you want’ (Adrian Miles, “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge”, 2007) there is no one source to look to, not one direct answer, so, how do we develop these skills? It is all well and good that users now have the individuality to form their idea and improve it by gathering supportive evidence, but one thing I struggle with is to find what I think it is that I am looking for. Adrian Miles shares the idea that online activity is no more complex than using the library and its books, however, because we have this implicit knowledge of print literacy embedded within us since before a computer mouse could fit in our hands, online technology’s new forms of presenting and distributing knowledge seems to be more confronting. Therefore, is it with practice that comes the understanding of this new expression of information and how to use it in the most beneficial way? ‘Internet services and their content now chat amongst themselves… different services or websites are all able to communicate with each other’ (Adrian Miles, “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge”, 2007) reveals the line drawn between print and network literacy where we can’t simply walk into a library, start at one point and finish at the other end, having found links between all authors and prints. Rather, Miles serves to bring to our awareness the interconnectedness that is apparent in the online world and the ease in doing so, where i can start by typing my initial idea into Google and finish with multiple tabs open that were sourced from one another. I mentioned previously that the online worlds new ways of expressing knowledge could be seen as confronting, not to say that the absence of a canonical order of sources isn’t liberating, but rather, as Vannevar Bush says; that ‘the investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers, conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear’ (Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“, 2013). Bush presents the idea that truly significant attainments are becoming lost in the mass of the inconsequential, which could be the answer to the question regarding how to develop the skills to find what you want. Concluding that the loss of order has not only proved beneficial for users but slightly detrimental for the significant authors in the sense that yes, as users we are offered a vastly broad online library that allows us to gather multiple viewpoints and theories however, maybe if the spectrum was not so extensive with the insignificant crowd, then perhaps the skills to find what we want would become implicit.

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