This is a book of strategies and tactics for evaluating information on the web.

A strategy is a plan that unites broad goals with available resources. It is, in the words of Max McKeown, an attempt to get to “desirable ends with available means.”  That “available means” part is important. In military planning, for example, strategy takes into account the weaponry each side possesses, the terrain on which battles might be waged, and the areas of strength of both sides. In business, strategy looks at the nature of the market one wishes to enter, and assesses how profit might be made in that market given a company’s particular talents and advantages.

The web is a unique terrain, substantially different from print materials, and yet too often attempts at teaching digital literacy do not take into account both the web’s unique challenges and its unique affordances. Some examples of what makes the web unique:

• The World Wide Web is a network of connected pages that point to one another. Meaning on the web is as much about what those pages say about one another as what the individual pages say.
• Decisions on the World Wide Web must often be made in seconds: Do I repost this picture? Retweet this story? Take this post seriously?
• People arrive at web pages with little idea who is writing them or why. If you were to order a book or read an article in your newspaper, you would have some idea of who had produced that information before you read it.
• Information on the web spreads virally, often moving through chains of publishers in a matter of minutes. As that information gets fed through the web ecosystem, it often mutates.
• Search engines and other web tools allow readers to sort through documents in quick iterative steps. Sites like Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine expose extensive histories of how documents evolved.
• There are unique financial incentives on the web to spreading lies, hoaxes, and inflammatory material, because of the way web advertising works.

There are many more differences, but you get the point. If we want to learn how best to evaluate information on the web, generic exhortations to “think critically” about the text we read aren’t going to cut it. And strategies we bring over from print, in many cases, will lead us astray.

We need something more suited to the web’s unique terrain, and that’s what this book attempts to provide.