NET RESULTS:Adults allow themselves to be duped by websites requesting bank and credit card numbers, writes Karlin Lillington
A COMMON complaint I hear from teachers, whether they are working with young children or young adults, is that students today lack digital media literacy skills.
This does not mean that they are not digitally literate. These are the generations that grew up with and regularly use the internet, downloads, uploads, podcasts, websites, weblogs, social networking, chat and the rest.
The concern, in a world where one UN survey shows that children spend about twice as much time absorbing information from electronic media such as the internet, television and video games as they spend in school, is that they do not have very good skills at interpreting information from online sources.
In an online world, everyone can be a writer and publisher - and that's the problem. Using tools that are easily found free on the net, even the clumsiest can make a reasonably professional- looking website.
On that website, people can post pretty much whatever they want. The content may look reliable when it is not; as if it comes from a professional or informed sources when it does not; original, when it is plagiarised; objective, when it is highly biased; honest, when it is duplicitous.
It used to be that when, as a student, you were sent off to write a report, you automatically were funnelled towards sources with some predetermined authority because they were already catalogued and in a library.
These days, a student might use whatever pops up on the net with no such intermediary arbiter of authority.
Don't get me wrong - I passionately believe one of the great strengths of the net is its ability to offer up the unique, the unusual, the fresh perspective, the unsanctioned view. Indeed, on a very serious level, that ability - and the difficulty in controlling the internet - supports important human rights struggles.
When it comes to writing a school report or university paper, though, students need to be able to question a site's authority and filter the net's constant jabber, because there is no arbiter to hint at what might be more reliable and what might not. That is where online literacy comes in.
However, this column isn't really about students and online literacy, it is about adults and online literacy.
Debates about online literacy tend to focus on students for the reasons above, but adults are a far more serious problem.
The issue with students can be addressed by curriculum, but the vast majority of the world's population are adults who cannot have their own gullibility countered as effectively.
It is adults who regularly get scammed and phished online because they actually believe an ex-government minister in Nigeria wants to pay them a massive sum to allow a few million euros to "rest" in their bank accounts.
They are duped by websites requesting credit card numbers and passwords to bank accounts. They buy from online shops that are simply fronts for scams.
And, as I witnessed recently, they happily pump money into the accounts of spurious vendors of online wonder remedies.
In this case, a number of otherwise intelligent people were happily parting with large sums of money for supplies of a purported holistic pain remedy advertised on a website that had three "happy customer" testimonials.
Because the company and website looked so obviously questionable to anyone who knew a modicum about scam websites and who were familiar with how such scams are run, I did an online search on the company.
I was not surprised to find numerous complaints on a consumer fraud website as well as some sceptical discussions about the company on some internet discussion boards.
I also quickly found the same company used the exact same website template but with different web addresses, for remedies for a dozen other maladies ranging from cures for rare and debilitating conditions to greying hair.
Such sites prey on the desperate with rare illnesses and the foolishly vain, who believe a pill can stop their hair growing grey.
Some people alleged they never received their orders or refunds, while others noted their supply of the remedy was shipped from countries regularly implicated in many scam online pharmaceutical operations - and the same three testimonials sat on all these cookie cutter websites.
Suffice it to say, the otherwise intelligent adults were quite happy to shoot the messenger, me, rather than listen to the message and use their noggins.
I am sure many defensively made another credit card order - for who knows what, as there is no way outside a lab test to verify the contents of the company's pills and liquids.
To me, that's a lot more worrying than a student using a dubious site for a school report. Online street smarts are needed by adults as well as kids. It is past the time for some national consumer campaigns aimed at securing basic adult digital media literacy.
klillington@irish-times.ie
Blog: www.techno-culture.com
