 Oh, hi, sorry, hold on a second, I gotta post something. How is your information created? Information is literally everywhere. We've got social media, commercials, academic articles, weird conspiracy theories my uncle sends me, and on and on and on. We have the ability to create and share information in a split second and send it out to the world. That information can be shaped and packaged in different ways based on how the information was created. What can the package or format tell us about how the information was created in the first place? Think about what you post on social media. Do you spend a lot of time researching what you're going to write or repost? Does anyone else review what you're posting and give their approval? Maybe not. The great and horrible power of the internet is that we can effortlessly produce and share information regardless of whether or not it's accurate. Social media is built on impulse. Now sometimes, a simple process is exactly what we need. We want to communicate a bit of basic information quickly and efficiently so we take advantage of our tech. Stay away from the hot dog place downtown. Some people got food poisoning yesterday. There are very few, maybe even no, barriers to getting this information out into the open. Thanks to our connectivity, even if information is inaccurate, you'll probably see someone start arguing for a different viewpoint or citing a different source. We all know what can happen in a social media thread. The process can be unmediated and chaotic, but it happens quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, think about scholarly information like what you'd find in a journal article. The process that this information goes through before it gets published is a bit different than what we see with social media. For one thing, it's far more time-consuming. Academic research is produced over months or even years, but experts in a certain discipline. Academic research emphasizes accuracy and thoroughness, which means research takes time. Part of the information creation process that takes time is having other experts look at the research to see if it's accurate or needs to be fixed. All that peer review. Like with social media, the context of what you're trying to do with the information is important. If you need to do academic research for class, then a journal article is probably the right thing for you. If you need something that's aimed at a more general audience and doesn't require a lot of background knowledge to read, then you might search for a more helpful source. Surprisingly, despite my uncle's need to share everything, social media is used to produce and share accurate and important information, and sometimes bad research makes it into an academic journal. And we didn't even talk about the process for news articles or books or how money and funding come into play in affecting information. There's never a 100% guarantee that any information is totally accurate no matter how it makes its way to you. The point is this. Don't just rely on the format to tell you whether or not your information is accurate or useful. Investigate how the information was created. What time and effort went into ensuring that the information, regardless of how it was delivered, is as reliable as it can be. And that's how you inform your thinking.