This collection of pages collectively represents my first hypertext essay, exploring validity, trust, governance and control of information in a networked media space.

Network literacy is not merely knowing about this, it is doing it. It is in this doing that we can understand that literacy is an applied knowing, or if you prefer a knowing through doing.… It is being comfortable with change and flow as the day to day conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and recognising that all of this may change, and appear differently in six months. What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build with these varieties of content and knowledge….. Network literacy means recognising that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is you think you want, of being able to judge it, and then of being able to incorporate this, in turn, into your knowledge flows. Finally, networked literacies are marked by your participation as a peer in these flows and networks — you contribute to them and in turn can share what others provide.

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30.

It will explore what Network Literacy means for the dissemination of accurate information in a landscape over distributed content production and unregulated dissemination channels. To explore this I will refer to two case studies of crowd-sourced investigations, one in which the primary source of information leading the investigation originated from a traditional authority and canonical source, the other, on which I will focus more attention, where the information formed through a crowd-sourced, network circulated, set of dispersed sources. To understand these case studies I will look at the nature of information and misinformation, and at the role morality of professional disseminators of information and canonical sources.

As media consumers sift through multiple sources, established media distribution channels clamber over one another to compete with emerging digitally native competitors, citizen journalism and crowd-sourced wiki platforms. But should these new platforms and methods hold the same trust previously bestowed on professional practices like Investigative Journalism? To understand the important implications of this question, let’s start by looking at what “information” is and why trust is inherently involved at all.