How can you judge the validity of things on the Internet?

There are particular conventions and methods to determine validity; news websites in particular have this. They have a look and feel about them that makes them all similar and gives them almost a ‘stamp of approval’

• Be wary. ‘The Onion’ looks and feels like a real news site but is a parody site.
• The number of people saying something (in particular news) the higher the chance its is going to be true.
• E.g. Robin Williams’ death: when I first heard I immediately turn to twitter to check the validity of the statement. When almost everyone is tweeting about it and linking various articles from various news sources, seems legit

Sometimes it’s very difficult to determine if someone/thing is legitimate online.

If you don’t know the topic area of a blog you are reading about, you need to research the area to prove the veracity of the blogger.

Wikipedia is often branded ad unreliable as it can be altered. However often times it is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

What are the limitations of network literacy? How does it differ to print literacy?:

• What limitations do both literacies share?
• What strengths help compensate for each other?
• Can they work together?
• Are they destined to be rivals?

Economic model that under rides it.

Things like print & network literacy did not exist before we inhabited them; they only exist because we decide to use them.

There are a multitude of literacies that we have – How to read a person’s face, voice, gestures, body language, how to read a street signs, how to tell when it’s safe to cross a street. These are all literacies we have.

Third party services in network literate space disempower us.

• We do not know the binary code to change the colour of our desktop background; a programmer has written a long and complicated code that allows us to easily change it. In this sense we are network illiterate.

However in print we understand thoroughly the intricacies of the medium.

• If we so chose, we could write a book, collect the pages, print them, bind them, etc.