It Can't Be True If It's On the Internet!

1. You have an important personal question you’d like answered. Explain the procedure for getting your question answered and why this method appeals to you (you don’t need to get specific, but let’s assume the answer does not require specific expert knowledge, as from a doctor).

When I was growing up, through middle school and high school, teachers often required an extensive work cited page for any essay we wrote. Naturally -we were using others' words.  But most teachers also required that we have five print sources to balance out our internet based finds.  The reasoning was that we couldn't trust that the internet was right (as if the internet were all-knowing individual.) Books and respectable print dailies like the New York Times could be trusted without any question of a doubt. (Woops...Ever heard of Jayson Blair?)

Over the years, maybe partly due to the development of the internet, I have come to believe that just because its printed its reliable, is a crock! There have been multiple occasions where I have used online databases and electronic journals as sources for me projects. Theses exact pieces can be found in print as well. Does that make the online version inherently less reliable? No. 

Now let me clarify - I don't believe all internet resources to be reliable, of course not. We have to use our brains to decipher what is and what isn't.  Let's take Wikipedia for example. Again teachers always told us to never use Wikipedia. I call bullshit on that! Go to Wikipedia and type in Coca Cola. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_cola#cite_note-0

Now the teachers tell us not to believe a word of Wikipedia because anybody could edit this page. The first sentence states that Coca Cola is sold in over 200 countries. If I told the teacher that I found out this information from Wikipedia, she would flunk me. BUT if I click the "1" footnote following that sentence, I find a list of sources. I follow the corresponding link back to Coca Cola's Website and walla - there it also says that the delicious soda beverage is served in 200+ countries. If I turn that in, I'll get an A. Moral of the story - Wikipedia itself might not always have the correct answers but the list of sources each topic provides is a sure bet to efficient knowledge gathering. 

Now having said all of that - when I need to figure out something for work, school, or jsut because I am curious as to why there are so many indoor football leagues, I turn to the internet. I used to ask Jeeves. But he wasn't very helpful so I turned to Google. Sometimes I'll type in the whole question and wind up on various forums where my exact question has been asked, and answered by other various users. Other times, I 'll just search keywords and sift for the answer myself. I usually back up my info gathering by checking  multiple places to see if the answers are congruent. 

Most recently, I was curious as to how to get my company's film, Chasing Legends,  onto itunes. You can't just cll up Apple and expect someone to know. So I googled it. Turns out the process is a real pricey, expensive, and long process unless you are backed by one of the big guys - Universal, Warner, Sony etc... To be certain the process which I had pieced together from Apples vague description on their website to multiple forums, I called up a company that supposedly handles this request. They confirmed what I found. Good enough for me and it only took 30 minutes. 

These days efficiency is everything. So whats wrong with using Google Mrs. Redding? (middle school teacher who despised the internet.)