Sunday, October 7, 2012

Guess what: 65% of Americans do NOT trust stuff on the Internet

English: There are no symbols that represent s...
English: There are no symbols that represent skepticism. This is one symbol that can be used to represent skepticism in atheism, or how skeptical inquiry, critical thinking, critical inquiry, and truth-seeking lead to atheism. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Did you know that 65% of Americans surveyed says they do NOT consider web content to be reliable?

Content Science did a survey involving 800 people in early 2012, and the results were published in March. The results are surprising: 65% of people surveyed says web content is "hit or miss" or "unreliable".

That's good, because people are skeptical. However, the survey also revealed that people rely on secondary sources to validate and filter what they find, and those are:

  1. Recommendation from an expert
  2. References
  3. Recommendation from someone you know
  4. Author / publisher / source

However, this is basically giving up your own chance to do some critical thinking, and thus, rely on someone else's "expertise". And how do you know if they really are expert in what they say they are? And what about their biases? 

[ read more on how experts can fail ]

This is also troubling... this means that majority of the content on the web is, to put it plainly, "crap". And if you don't keep your "crap detector" running properly your mind is going to fill with crap.

[ read more on "crap detector" ]

You can see their results here:

http://content-science.com/expertise/content-insights/65-percent-of-americans-surveyed-think-web-content-is-not-reliable
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