Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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The American Editor
Online information
Learning to navigate a sea of information
Internet allows people to get mountains of unfiltered,
out-of-context information; without gatekeepers (or people who are trained
to be skeptical), we may face anarchy
By Chet Raymo
All summer we followed the Mars Pathfinder mission on the Internet.
We saw the pictures and examined the data beamed back from Mars almost
as quickly as they were available to the scientists at mission control.
These were not photographs and data filtered through the media, but
the original information — every pixel, every number, every geological
and meteorological observation from the Red Planet.
And more. We had analyses by NASA scientists. Explanatory animations.
Diagrams and graphs. Commentary. And a vast amount of opinion from Ordinary
Joes expressed on private Web sites.
We also read about joke conspiracy theories, the "pictures NASA didn’t
want us to see." The face of Christ on a Martian rock. A flying saucer
in the Martian atmosphere. A Martian Bigfoot walking around in the red
dust.
Some of these joke pages were as graphically realistic and as convincingly
constructed as the official NASA site.
All this information, real and bogus, was available to anyone with a
computer and access to a telephone line.
What was true for Pathfinder is true of every other field of human endeavor.
A few keystrokes will bring into our homes newspapers of record and the
ravings of madmen, works of art by great masters and Sunday painters, stock-market
wisdom and money-gouging scams, science and pseudoscience — a vast unsorted
sea of information and opinion, some valuable, some off the wall.
The essence of the Internet is its glorious intellectual promiscuousness.
No gatekeepers stand between sources and consumers of information. We have
entered the Age of Unfiltered Information.
Previously, we obtained information from books, magazines, newspapers,
radio, television, libraries and schools. Editors, librarians, and teachers
decided what information is "true," legitimate," "useful" or "appropriate."
This had advantages. We were saved from drowning in a sea of superfluous
information. We were instructed by those who are wiser and better educated
than ourselves. Our society gathered a stabilizing degree of cohesiveness.
By contrast, the Internet is a gate flung wide open. The loony pages
of civilian militias are as accessible as the pages of a Nobel prize-winning
peacemaker. The pages of the International UFO Museum and Research Center
have equal standing with the pages of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
This anarchy can be exhilarating, liberating, fun. For the first time
in history, individuals can interact with the world of information without
the constraints of official gatekeepers.
This revolution has enormous implications for education. Schools are
fast becoming obsolete as purveyors of facts; facts come flooding from
our computers faster than we can assimilate them. What the schools must
now provide are skills of critical thinking. Our children must learn to
become their own gatekeepers.
How does one filter the information that gushes from the Net? How does
one distinguish information that has the backing of a broad base of educated
opinion from fringe or crackpot information?
Say a kid does a search for "cold fusion." She gets 5,000 hits, more
information than she could have obtained in a dozen years of teachers and
books. But these hits range the gamut from respectable scientific research
to the incoherent thoughts of perpetual motion cranks. Even more confusing,
some of the goofier opinions are found on the glitzier pages. How does
the student differentiate?
Another student finds his way to the classy home page of the Institute
for Creation Research. He notes that it has a faculty with Ph.D.s, a graduate
program, a science education center, even a list of ideas for science fair
projects. How is the student to know that the institute has pariah status
within the scientific community?
The Internet is like a vast marketplace of ideas where every purveyor
has the same size stall. Some stalls are decked out with neon lights; others
are shabby and drab. Some stall keepers promise the world; others offer
only modest helpings of "fact." Where does one shop?
Does it matter? Yes. A vigorous marketplace of ideas is healthy, but
society needs a certain degree of shared faith if it is not to disintegrate
into anarchy. If all ideas in the marketplace are equal, then no ideas
will truly matter.
If we are to live in a society without gatekeepers, we must educate
our children to be open-minded but skeptical, tolerant of diversity but
passionate about truth, respectful of received opinion but equipped with
tried-and-true skills of history, rhetoric, logic, statistics, and the
experimental method.
Raymo, a professor of physics at Stone-hill College in North Easton,
Mass., is the author of several books on science. A version of this article
originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
