The Price of Information Critical Literacy, Education, and Today’s Internet

Perhaps it is worthwhile to state the obvious: Users can find more online information than ever before via innovative blogs; collaborative databases; archives of all shape, size, and objective; news and alternative magazines; corporate and nonprofit annual reports; for-profit and nonprofit encyclopedias; national, regional, and alternative newspapers (some of which are experimenting with the purpose and scope of journalism); public watchdog sites; social networking sites; directories; governmental and business reports; photographs; images; digitized film and video; streaming audio and radio podcasts; fully preserved Web pages from the early days of the Internet; entire books; maps; software services; catalogues; scholarly journals; laboratories; 3-D models; and animation. In the age of convergence (Quinn, 2006), so much of our media is online, accessible at no cost beyond an Internet connection. Indeed, the Internet’s current information environment is an extraordinarily rich mixture.