It occurred to me today that quality information has a hefty price tag attached.

I’m an English teacher, and I have been for almost two full decades. During that period of time, to an ever increasing extent, a disparity has been growing between cheap information and expensive information. Cheap information is information that is easy to get and is readily available. Expensive information is harder to find, is of a greater quality, and is more rare. The disparity between cheap and expensive information has played itself out in my classes in the realm of research writing.

I’ve always taught my students, as we’ve studied research writing, the difference between a primary source and a secondary source. The idea that some reference information might be cited by someone else, and that my student’s decision to cite the person citing the information, rather than going to find the original information at its source, is 1) lazy, and 2) a decision to use a secondary source. And I’ve always warned my students about using secondary sources and how it can be dangerous, because we are, in effect, trusting the secondary source and the manner in which they are citing the information from the primary source.

Initially, back in the early 00s, this wasn’t a big deal because the internet back then had yet to become so diluted. But, I’ve had to be more and more diligent in teaching my students about intelligent internet use, especially when it comes to quality research information. At the end of the day, I get the message across to my students, and they understand, and then they (hopefully) carry the understanding into how they consume other parts of the internet.

We must be responsible as we get information from the internet.

But, the philosophical lesson here might be harder for some people, especially those members of our society who used to have trust and faith in the national media machine.

I remember, back in the day, when people watched the nightly news. And, the news that you watched was the result of which of the nightly news anchors you trusted. Did you used to watch the CBS Evening News because Dan Rather was the guy that you trusted? Or, did you prefer the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw? Perhaps Brinkley? Or Cronkite?

I’m not sure that any level of trust in any particular news anchor, or in any particular news organization, is warranted anymore. I look at most organized news as propagandist. If you don’t –if you have a certain news organization or journalist that you give your allegiance to– you’ve got more trust than I have.

In fact, I’ve become more and more convinced that there are fewer and fewer places these days where you can go to get quality information. Rather, there are plenty of places to go if you want information that has a particular slant to it. And, if you pair this understanding with the knowledge that people tend to be 1) oppositional, 2) naive, and 3) lazy, then you get a situation where “my sources are the only good sources” and “those other sources (especially those that oppose my sources) are bad sources, used by ‘them’ with ‘their slant'”.

Don’t talk with my father-in-law about CNN, and don’t talk to my best friend at work about Fox News.

The other problem with this is that these organizations have become aware of the fact that the public is aware of the fact that they are slanted. And so, faced with the choice to either 1) do something about their slanted peddling of information, 2) deny their reputation, or 3) embrace their reputation, the choice seems obvious, right?!

They’ve drawn the battle lines.

The conservatives don’t watch CNN and the liberals don’t watch Fox News and the rest of us (the most of us) don’t watch either (which is fairly easy), or we watch them both, fully understanding the slant with which each of them do their jobs (which is much more work).

* * *

Take my coffee, for example. I don’t really like the taste of coffee, per se. Rather, I just need something to put my creamer in every morning.

I would estimate that I put two-to-three tablespoons of creamer in the bottom of my coffee mug every morning when I put that mug into the Keurig. It ends up perfect, IMO.

But, would that same amount of creamer work for half a cup of coffee? Would that same amount of creamer work for a gallon of coffee? What about fifty gallons?

This phenomenon is referred to, in psychology, as the just noticeable difference. Could someone with a refined palate detect two tablespoons of creamer dispersed in fifty gallons of coffee?

Because I’m starting to feel like the presence of unbiased information in the world is like two tablespoons of creamer in an ocean of coffee.

* * *

So then, in an attempt to get information without a slant, where’s a person to go to get information that doesn’t come from the radical right or the equally radical left?

Why, we’ll go to social media, of course!

SMH.

Because the quality of the information that you get on social media may not be as slanted (unless your contacts on social media do nothing but pull in video footage from Fox News or CNN or –even worse– Yahoo News), but I wouldn’t call it quality information, either.

And, I swear, people are going to social media to get their news. What do they actually get?

You end up getting the opinions of pop stars or sports heroes or your old friends from high school or your fellow church goers or the other women in your kid’s PTO –> none of these people are experts. They might be opinionated (read: slanted/biased), but they aren’t experts.

So, then, if we can’t trust the media outlets to give us reliable information on whether our government is doing a good job, and we can’t count on our high school football teammates to understand how viruses spread, we are left with only one option –> work.

Remember what I said earlier about people being lazy?

How much work are you going to do to get to the information that has no slant and that comes from experts?

Will you do more work to get to that information than it takes for you to get to the information that A) confirms your previously-held beliefs, and B) makes you feel better?

In a world where Minute Rice seems like a lot of work for a lot of people…