Part of The Alchemist's
Lair Web Site
Maintained by Harry E. Pence, Professor of Chemistry, SUNY Oneonta, for
the use of his students. Any opinions are totally coincidental and have
no o
fficial endorsement, including the people who sign my pay checks. Comments
and suggestions are welcome (pencehe@oneonta.edu).
Last Revised June 9, 2000
Recently my daughter asked me to videotape some old episodes of the TV show,
"The X-Files", and so I had my
first experience with the strange
world of FBI agents, Mulder and Scully. As most people know, this show become
very popular despite (or because of) being based on the premise that the
government is engaged in a massive cover-up to hide information about strange
phenomena, ranging from alien abductions to poltergeists. As I watched each
program begin with the slogan, "Trust No One!", I began to ask
myself some basic questions about teaching information literacy.
One of the fundamental comp onents of information literacy is the ability to evaluate the accuracy of information. We normally assume that there is a hierarchy of trustworthiness among information sources; some sources, such as the U.S. Government, are intrinsically more likely to be valid than individuals or fringe groups (like NICAP on the X Files). When someone ignores this assumption, as Pierre Sallinger did by announcing that he knew that a U.S. missile had downed TWA flight 800 because he saw it on a Web page, we dismiss it as s tupid judgment.
The truth is that all information sources have some bias. Even in science, where we pride ourselves of the reliability of our information, cases like cold fusion and polywater argue for caution. Some information will have a subtle and unintended bias; in other cases there is blatant falsehood. The development of the World Wide Web has given our students greatly increased access to misinformation, and often this is presented in a most convincing manner.
Many Americans have a s trong mistrust for authority, and when teaching information literacy, we must maintain a delicate balance between reinforcing that suspicion and instilling a essential level of skepticism. Another X-Files slogan says, "The Truth is Out There", and some sources are, indeed, more likely to be trustworthy than others, but if we are to avoid the trap that Mr. Sallinger fell into, we must constantly validate what we find through independent sources. We all wish the world were a safer place, but as our students navigate their way along the information highway, "Trust No One" applies equally well to hitchhikers, alien quests, and information sources.
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