I have
to admit that I am a “googleholic”. The
urban dictionary defines “googleholic” as “One who is obsessed with anything
Google” or “one who can't live without
Google search” (Urban Dictionary.com
website, n.d.). Google is my library, my doctor, my
entertainer, my counselor and face it, my educator. With that said, I know that I have to take
everything I read in Google with a grain of salt. Let’s be honest, how much of the information
on Google is actually real valid information? According to wikianswers.com, 300 million
people search on Google every day ("How
Many People," n.d.). Of the 300
million people that actually post information on websites and forums, how many
are actual experts in the discipline they are posting about? How valid is the statistic I just posted seeing
that it was retrieved from wiki answers where anyone can post? I just tried running a search…..yes on Google,
to see if I could find statistical evidence on how much information on the
internet is true. Obviously it would be
impossible to come up with any conclusive evidence but what I did come across in
an article from Huffington Post was that “98 percent of Americans distrust
information on the Internet, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive” (Fitzgerald,
2012). This, in my opinion, speaks
volumes about how much on the information superhighway is actually true.
Many times when you search for information on Google,
you don’t know where it came from. Many
sites, websites, forums, blogs and even some online journals, don’t reveal the
source of the data. I just did a quick Google
search of the term “leadership” and chose an article from Psychology Today. The article is called “What is Charisma and
Charismatic Leadership?” and it has an author (Riggio, 2012). The author gives definitions of different
styles of leadership, but where did these definitions come from? I don’t think he made them up because they
sound like similar definitions from my Organizational Leadership textbook from
the last course I took. I’ve also noticed that whenever I use Google
as my natural pharmacist and google for a remedy for some type of ailment, most
websites I visit will give a list of benefits and remedies but will never post
the source from where they retrieved that information. Is there scientific evidence that drinking
lemon water will lower my cholesterol or is this just the opinion of someone who
has tried it?
Google is great when we
want information on the mundane aspects of our life, but you don’t want to rely
on it if you are having adverse reactions to a medicine or as a self-diagnosis
for life-threatening diseases. You also
don’t want to rely on Google when doing any kind of academic research. When it’s important to know the truth, backed
up by statistical and scientific evidence, you need to go to more scholarly
sources of information. Scholarly information is either written by experts
or professionals in the field or written by people who are careful to cite and
refer back to the source of the information.
A more complete definition of scholarly source is provided on the Penn
State website and it states:
Scholarly Journals are journals which are respected for
the research and information they provide about the topic they cover. They are written by and for people who have
experience in the discipline or field. The
research is often refereed meaning that is reviewed by other researchers who
are knowledgeable about the topic of the article ("What Is A Scholarly," n.d.).
Scholarly sources can be identified
by features such as: content, language, audience,
Intent,
authorship, peer-review, references, and listing (California State University
San Marcos Library, n.d.).
Google is still a great source for
researching any topic, but it’s important to practice critical thinking when
reviewing the information from any source on the internet. It’s best to reason through the information,
compare and contrast the information you find, and be willing to question what
you learn with an unbiased nature. Apply
the elements of reason which are elements that allow us to arrive at the most
accurate conclusions after assessing all possibilities and reasoning to the
best of our ability.
References
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