When I was in high school, there was one week during my freshman year when we didn’t go to our regular classes, but instead got to sign up for some special single session classes for the week. During this time, I recall learning how to french braid in the cosmetology class, but I also took a class with the librarian about doing research. During that class, I remember distinctly her instructing us on how to do research online.
It was the year 2000, and the internet was still very young. Wikipedia and social media hadn’t even been born at the time. But, sagely, the librarian taught us about primary sources and how important it was to recognize that most of the things we used in our research were secondary or tertiary sources at best.
Little did I know at the time that this was one of the most important lessons I’d learn in high school.
Fast forward twenty plus years and I wish a class like that would have been mandatory in high school, more than a special one-off fluke. As a society, in just a handful of generations, we went from scarcity of information to information overload.
If Gutenberg’s printing press changed the world, providing access to books and print media in a transformative way, the internet has transformed the world a thousand times more. A shelf of books is worth less than a searchable database, through which we can find whatever it is we’re looking for.
Online, you can find every answer to any question you have. Ask any question and you’ll find well-written answers that say, “Absolutely yes,” “Unequivocally no,” “Maybe” and “Sometimes.” And, at the rate new content is created online, this overwhelming overload of content and opinion is not getting any better.
Yet, most adults living today were educated in a society where textbooks were written by experts who did the research on primary sources for them. School administrators, teachers, school boards and government entities determined our curriculum, selecting what information we’d be provided, and set it in front of us, asking us to memorize and regurgitate.
Fact versus fiction seemed like an easy distinction in that world, where the lines were clearly defined and the messiness of forming our own opinion was still within the clearly defined boundaries of the predetermined facts.
Colleen Cook works full-time as the Director of Operations at Vinyl Marketing in Ashland, where she resides with her husband Mike and three young daughters. She’s an insatiable extrovert who enjoys finding reasons to gather people.
Today, though, we live in a state of confusion. We have information delivered to our eyeballs each second, with little reprieve. Each time we engage, we’re delivered more, similar information in order to monetize our attention and drive forward capitalism.
Forget primary sources, we have our opinions and our trusted circles of similarly minded networks. Who has time to do the work of digging into the actual truth, and fact checkers probably have an agenda, right?
So, instead of approaching controversy with openness and discernment, we enter it with the shared opinion of our safe group of like-minded people and let that serve as our primary sources, disregarding and dismissing anything that disagrees with our worldview because, let’s be frank, it’s just too hard to sort out and we don’t want to threaten our sense of belonging. We don’t want to risk our place in the tribe.
It’s unsustainable, the way the world works right now. The elusive nature of truth in our world has created a chasm so great that people are willing to stake their lives on it. But, if we can’t trust experts, we can’t believe people’s testimonies, and we can’t find and review primary sources, what hope is there?
