I’m not saying that the Internet doesn’t have all (or at least most) of the answers. It does however, allow too many people to believe they are experts, provide a forum for those people who frankly should only ever have been heard by their hick congregation in Gainesville, Florida, and seemingly flings accountability out of the window (‘I read (insert incredulous fact) on the Internet, it must be true’).
I’m not anti-establishment (despite my father’s attempts), I’m not even anti-Internet – goodness knows, where else would I access government white papers and academic research about the impact of domestic abuse on children for my latest creative brief – but people are inherently lazy (OK, slight generalisation, but only slight), will pick a fact from a website, any website and base entire dissertations around it regardless of its source (this is not a dig at students, just an example). For my job, insights are the holy-grail, without the right insight, into a customer / market / behaviour we can’t hope to be successful marketers / planners / strategists and I believe these still need to come from research with real people (by all means, embrace social media to help you do this) but please don’t use a hunch, a little known fact off an unknown website (they are little known and unknown for a reason) or rely on Google or Wikipedia to provide all the information you could possible need.
The Internet is a wealth of information, good, no, great information at that, as long as you know how to disseminate. Check your sources, Google the author and check he isn’t a nutter and if he is and you still want to reference him, make sure you allude to the fact so that you don’t look as though you think gullible was removed from the OED.
I haven’t even covered scams (a topic close to Access’ heart) but there are, put simply, some dirty rotten scoundrels out there – beware.
Luckily there are some Internet angels there to look out for us and help us discern http://www.vtstutorials.ac.uk/detective/
People, my call to you, use text speak if you must, tweet about your dinner, post drunk pictures of yourself for prospective employers to see, but please, when it matters, don’t make yourself look stupid or worse, misinform others, you have been warned...
