Assessment of Quality is Purely dependent on the Individual!

(Under Construction)

I can not count how many times I have been up late at night, trying effortlessly to find further resources for an assignment due the next day. The question I find myself constantly asking is, is this resource any good? Is this resource credible, and how do I determine the quality and authenticity of this information?

Now, if I applied the same critical evaluative techniques as I would for a book, music or magazine, maybe the entire process wouldn't be so hard. After all, you determine the quality and relevance of a book or music as pertinent to your tastes at the time. The content on the world wide web is more fragmented than ever because of the interaction it has inspired with the intergration of various media devices. By media, I mean users uploading information, video's, and their own user developed content. With the expansion of information of the world wide web, we have seen the development of more sophisticated search engines. Now, there is more of a possibility of finding information about any possible topic and researching answers to any particular question. The internet has inspired a networked society, and with the masses of new information circulating the world, networked data are both valuable, and contributing to the congestion, raising the question of quality of information on the internet.

I do believe that consumers assess the quality of the information dependent upon the systems available to them and that as humans we do critically evaluate information we receive, both in our active daily lives and also while we source information online.

For instance, consumers with access to only a small group of social networks, would rely heavily on the assessment of peer evaluations. A number of search engines also attribute quality and relevance by the amount of views or hit the site has received from the general public.This is evident in YouTube, where by users can rate the clips that they see, attributing status to resemble quality to other users. Sites such as B-School, are putting stamps of approval on information and allowing consumers to access it via intermediary tools.