With the widespread distribution of the internet, coupled with increasing bandwidth day by day, the internet is become the one stop shop for all your information needs. Whatever you want to know, be it about history, music, culture, or even things obscure as the best children’s toy in 1995, chances are there will be a bunch of articles online about that very thing.
The integration of articles online into our lives has been a slow and steady process, most of us these days don’t even realize we were reading an article until after we finished it. This both has its own pros and cons. On one hand, articles online allow us to grab at relevant information for whatever we need, whenever we need it. On the other however, is the fact that all articles online should be treated with suspicion. As the age old saying goes, ‘don’t believe everything you read’. This fact is truer now than it ever was before. With the easy accessibility of articles online on a variety of different topics, together with the blatant lack of credibility of most of them, it pays to be on the safe side and take whatever you read in articles online with a grain of salt.
The very nature of the internet allows every other Common Joe with an internet connection, sitting in their grandma’s basement to write whatever they please. And the world is their audience. He could be writing purely just for fun’s sake, deliberately giving wrong information to make a fool out of others, then again, some of the articles online might have been written by experts, who know what they’re talking about. It’s up to you to weed out the gems from the literally mountain high pile of rubbish.
One sure fire way to do this is to check the source, or which website the article is on. Most credible articles online are usually based on credible, well known websites as well. The aforementioned prankster’s articles are usually found in the much more shady areas of the internet: personal website, blogs and what not.
Although they provide a valuable source of information on nearly everything you could imagine, articles online cannot be trusted a first glance, nearly always, further research is needed to verify the information that you’ve been provided with. We should always remember that anonymity is both the internet’s biggest advantage, as well as its greatest weakness.