The Internet: All or Nothing?

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in the near future, The Year of the Flood, said this about the internet, and I thought it deserved to be shared (p.293):

And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.

And that, my friends, is why I think information literacy is so important. The alternative is a dystopian future in which what could have been free and open access to information becomes instead a simulacrum in which no one knows what is real and what isn’t.

But perhaps that future is unavoidable, even so…