What are the most popular online activities? If you were to pose this question 100 random people at your local super market, chances are that 90 of your answers would include social media, online gaming, internet video, or email. However, among those four popular activities only two of them — email and sharing videos — would be included among the top ten.
While email is the second most common online activity, sharing online video barely cracks the top ten. Despite Americans’ seemingly insatiable appetite for social media, gaming, and videos, searching for info online remains the number one online activity among web users over aged 13 and up. Whether they seek their general information and random facts via online articles, blogger news, or corporate news websites, it usually does not take more than a minute or two for them to find their answers. In fact, most of them can find specific info online in a matter of seconds.
Individual opinions are certain to vary, but the most valuable thing about the internet is the speed and ease with which we can use this incredible tool to find the answer to almost any question for which an answer exists. However, the web’s biggest strength also happens to be its Achilles heel. With so much superfluous information out there, much of which is posted by unqualified individuals who consider themselves experts, and espouse unsubstantiated personal views and opinions that they present as fact.
You would think that Americans would approach more critically information that emanates from questionable sources. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to do that when so many web users cannot consistently distinguish a credible source from dubious ones. Thus, we end up will tens of millions of gullible web users who basically anti-encyclopedias.
In fact, the internet’s most popular source for finding info online, Wikipedia is a prime example of this trend. Despite Wikipedia’s popularity, it is unwise to take anything on that websites as 100% factual, because anybody can go on there and add, subtract, or edit much of the information on that site. Furthermore, an over-abundance of Wikipedia articles are not fact-checked and include information that is not culled from legitimate sources.
When it comes to finding online news, general information, or just random facts it is always in your best interest to get your facts through sources you can trusts. Since nobody has ever spent time doing conducting either formal or informal research to find false information, the benefits of learning to identify the most credible sources for online information are obvious.