Credibility of the Web: Why We Need Dialectical Reading

The World Wide web is growing rapidly, unpredictably, unevenly, and without the familiar guideposts of established publishers and vetting procedures. As the web assumes ever greater importance in education, research, and daily life, these phenomena deserve more critical examination. Is the web a bountiful source of information and resources on every conceivable topic, as some claim? Or, is it unreliable, ephemeral, and overcommercialized as others warn? Do we need to develop criteria for evaluating web pages to separate the good from the bad? Is the web a fundamentally different medium that requires new modes of critique? This essay explores how characteristics of the web lead to it being simultaneously a great and a questionable source of information. The issue then becomes how we should read such a complex and contradictory text.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe