Reading the Internet

“Information pretending to objectivity but possessing a hidden agenda of persuasion or a hidden bias is among the most common kind of information in our culture” Robert Harris

The internet is here to stay and our students must/need to know how to read what they find there. 

In the next section of Burke’s Illuminating Text he discusses reading the internet and the wide range of texts, each serving a different audience and purpose.  An important point taken from the section is that different modes of discourse should be read differently especially those found on the web.  For example students/youth are able to focus and pick up on certain coded spelling found in most email like differences between ur (your) and u r (you are) with quite ease.  However they often lack the same skill when it comes to reading web sites.

It is important for us as teachers to help students acquire the proper skills they need to determine the validity, aesthetic or literary quality, accuracy, and authenticity of information online.  To achieve this Burke asks us to start at classifying or defining web sites.  For example most web sites fall under commercial (.com) educational (.edu) institutional (.org) news/media (.com) and personal (.com).  This is complicated because rarely do web sites exist to serve one purpose however understanding the content and the context in which it is placed is a critical step to developing strong reading skills over the internet.  As we teach, we can use these classifications to develop an understanding of purpose for each web site and information being read such as: to educate, to entertain, to inform, to persuade, to sell, to share, and to support.   Now as stated above most sites don’t exist to serve one purpose, but we can show students how using multiple purposes can create a more powerful means of communication.  And of course with the knowledge of purpose we are able to fully convey an understanding of the intended meanings of each site.

It is clear that Burke and other educators like Susan Zimmerman and Ellin O. Keene strive to teach students to become discerning readers.  In Zimmerman and Keene’s  Mosaic of thought they describe interactions between two different student readers and their inability to ask questions before they ever begin to read.  Each of these educators emphasize this preread ability to ask questions (to themselves of course) that vary on the purpose for reading but still nonetheless allows them to take the right information from the right resources to fulfill the right purpose.   In alignment with Burke and online reading it is almost more important to ask these questions as you explore the wide range of information the web has to offer.

With all this now we have to ask a student to know how to look beyond surface details as quality writing.  A tall order for middle school students and high school students, so with this Burke suggests a working rubric that indicates key topics such as: sources, timeliness, authorities, audiences, quality control, etc.  It is with this section of Burke’s text that I cannot help but think what levels of aptitude are we expecting of our students.  Is it something at such a young age we rely heavily on or tip toe into it at a middle school and early high school age and dive into at the later years.  The internet provides such vast arrays of information that it seems to undermine the very essence of credibility.  As an adult I still find myself unknowing and often times baffled at the information I read, almost to the point where nothing is truly credible and nothing is fully explained.    However what is clear is that our students must start somewhere, and by teaching our students to read the internet critically further prepares them for the digital age.