Do you trust me? I wouldn't!

You may think you know who's behind the mask, but do you really?

There's an awful lot of information being offered on blogs these days. No matter what topic you choose, somebody, and probably more than just one somebody, is blogging about it. If you do a Google search about nearly anything, blog entries pop up right away, and sometimes it takes a while to realize that what you have found is posted on a blog because many of them are formatted to look very professional and authoritative. The question is, who writes all those blogs, and why should I, or you, pay attention to them?

Considering that this is a blog post, you must think I have a lot of nerve writing this, but somewhere along the line I was trained as an academic researcher, and I spend a good deal of my time nagging undergraduates about the quality of the sources they use in their papers. I should say immediately that I am not talking about online academic journals that publish refereed articles in a non-print, electronic format. With the sky-high cost of publishing anything these days, putting your academic journal online seems like a good move. (It also cuts down on the number of those cute little article reprints that your colleagues press upon you. Sure they're justifiably proud of having gotten published, but what are you supposed to do with those things? How fortunate to have a shredder at home.) No, what I am talking about are the blogs written by folks like me, or folks who know a great deal more than I do, or folks who just want to see their words "in print," whether they know anything or not.

For many of us, and for me in particular, blogging is just a matter of putting your thoughts out into the ether and hoping that someone who is interested will read them and maybe even respond. And even if readers don't respond, there is still a great deal of satisfaction, not to mention real benefit, in getting your thoughts in order and expressing yourself in a formal manner. Whether one expects a response or not, once the blog is published, it will eventually find its way onto the search engines, and people will find it when they search the topic about which you have written. Knowing that puts a burden of responsibility on the blogger to be truthful and accurate, even if one is under no requirement at all to be fair and balanced. The information literacy tutorial provided by our college library gives four criteria for evaluating the quality of materials. They should be useful/relevant, timely, appropriate, and authoritative. The sticking point with blogs is obvious: How do you know that the writer of the blog you are reading has any credentials whatever? Anybody can write a blog. That's the point. Ever since I have written entries for encyclopedias, I have become very sceptical about credentials. If they'll let me write for an encyclopedia, God only knows who's writing blogs.

It pays, therefore, to be a very critical reader these days, because you have very little idea whether the author whose words you are reading knows anything at all. Fortunately, it's not always overpoweringly difficult to check the accuracy of what you are reading. For example, if I tell you that corvine means "of or pertaining to crows," you can look it up and see if I am right. I may even be obliging enough to give you a source for my definition. But once you get past the basic things like whether I know the meaning of the words I use, what then? And that isn't as basic as it sounds, because I have found that many of my students use words that don't mean what they think they mean. I won't burden you with examples, but it's all too true.

Some blogs assume a cloak of authority by their association with institutions that we trust, more or less anyway. So if you read blogs associated with the New York Times or CNN, for example, you may think that someone who knows something is monitoring what is written on those blogs. Maybe that's true, although I don't know that it's true. It's a jungle out there, and you have to be careful. Just remember, I warned you.