subject: How to Do Research with Satellite Internet [print this page] Satellite Internet has fundamentally transformed the way information is communicated and shared today. Everything is faster and easier. You can type an essay today up today and send it have way around the world in seconds, instead of having to mail something over a period of weeks. This makes doing research incredibly easy and convenient, for whatever your purpose may be. Say you are going to the Carolinas on vacation you can instantaneously look up local hotels and user-generated reviews, different hiking trails, and restaurant suggestions. Or say you are a college student writing a paper in the Reagan years. Just log on to your satellite Internet, and you can access the archives of newspapers across the country dating back decades to find out what people were thinking about the former President at the time. You are no longer constrained to your library for reading materials either, as you can simply research books on Reagan on a host of online book vendors and have them shipped right to your house. The logistics have been streamlined.
But with faster and easier access to information provided by satellite Internet, a whole new host of problems has emerged. Information is no longer as reliable as it once was. While looking for hotel reviews in the Carolinas, you might stumble upon someone who has a grudge against one particular place that actually happens to be quite decent and affordable. That business will now suffer from the anonymous words of an online reviewer. Or in the Reagan research paper example, you might read through online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and find information that is poorly researched or factually inaccurate. Even worse, you might stumble upon web pages or blogs that are extremely biased, either blindly championing the past president or looking for any and every reason to attack him. Because there is no filter of a publisher, people can write whatever they want, regardless of their grip on reality (although it should be said that a lot of factually inaccurate, hyper-biased information on history and politics gets published in traditional mediums as well).
So before you take the words of the random satellite Internet author as gospel, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. The first thing you want to do is do a double-take of what website you are on. Looking up keywords in a random search engine can lead you in all kinds of crazy directions. If you find yourself on a website titled "Reagan Lovers of America Unite", you might want to take the information with a grain of salt. Next, figure out who the specific author is. Is this information coming from a Harvard Economics professor who has written a piece in the New York Times? Or an anonymous unemployed person who spends all day writing rants on Yelp? If you are doing research for an assignment or formal paper, you want to double-check any information that is provided by user content, even if it does not seem outlandish. People get dates and facts wrong all the time.
