Internet Credability essays

Internet Credability essays Information is everywhere on the Internet. It exists in large quantities and it is continuously being created and revised. This information exists in a many varieties like facts, opinions, stories, interpretations, or statistics, and it is created for many purposes such as to inform, to persuade, to sell, to present a viewpoint, or to create or change an attitude or belief. For each of these various kinds of purposes information exists on many levels of quality or reliability. Quality ranges from excellent to awful and includes every shade in between. Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. If you reach out with your eyes closed and grab the first magazine you touch, you are much more likely to get a supermarket tabloid than a respected journal. Now imagine that your store lets anyone in the world print up a magazine and put it in the magazine section. Now if you reach out blindly, you might get the New York Times business section or you might get littl e Jimmys report on the stock market for Mrs. Smiths 3rd grade class. There is an extremely wide variety of material on the Internet, ranging in its accuracy, reliability, and value. Unlike most traditional information media like books, magazines, or organizational documents, no one has to approve the content before it is made public. It is the job of the searcher, then, to evaluate what he or she locates, in order to determine whether it suits his or her needs, and is reliable enough to cite. In a recent search for information on Peronism, I found several articles, and I chose two of them to analyze for credibility. The first is titled Peronism and the Secret History of Cultural Studies by Jon Beasley-Murray. The first step in determining the reliability is finding the origin and the authors purpose. At first it appears that this site is run by George Mason University, but upon further investigation it is actually a...