Credibility
 

Co-Editors: Miriam Metzger, University of California at Santa Barbara; Andrew Flanagin, University of California at Santa Barbara

Summary of Volume: With the sudden explosion of digital media content and access devices in the last generation, there is now more information available to more people from more sources than at any time in human history. Pockets of limited access by geography or status notwithstanding, people currently have ready access to almost inconceivably vast information repositories that are increasingly portable, accessible, and interactive in both delivery and formation. One result of this contemporary media landscape is that there exist incredible opportunities for learning, social connection, and individual entertainment and enhancement in a wide variety of forms. At the same time, however, the origin of information, its quality, and its veracity are in many cases less clear than ever before, resulting in an unparalleled burden on individuals to locate appropriate information and assess its meaning and relevance. Moreover, the same wide scale access and multiplicity of sources that ensure vast information availability also make assessing the credibility of information accurately extremely complex. It is also highly consequential: Assessing credibility inaccurately can have serious social, personal, educational, relational, health, and financial consequences. 

This volume addresses these issues by considering credibility—the objective and subjective components of the believability of a source or message—in the contemporary media environment, with a particular emphasis on youth audiences and experiences. While research on credibility and new media is burgeoning, extremely little of it focuses on any user groups younger than college students. Therefore, the goal of the volume is to fill this void by drawing out the research, policy, and educational implications of credibility for youth and learning as a way to set the agenda for future work in this area.

Volume Chapter Summaries and Authors:

"Children, Credibility, and the Complexity of Evaluating Online Information"
Matthew S. Eastin
Currently, there is a dearth of research investigating how children perceive the credibility of online information.  The current chapter outlines research on credibility, offers insight into the difficulty children face when processing online information, and finally, provides a lens for better understanding new media literacy through research on credibility perceptions.  

 
"Credibility of Health Information in Digital Media:  Paradigm Changes Needed" 
Gunther Eysenbach
This chapter will summarize the evidence on credibility and credibility assessment by consumers as reported in empirical studies too date, with special consideration of health information, and point out some paradigm changes which are needed in our thinking when looking at these issues, with special considerations for youth.
 

"Structural and Dynamic Challenges to Teaching Credibility Assessment" 
Frances Jacobson Harris 
This paper explores structural and dynamic challenges to teaching credibility assessment in today’s schooling environment. Structural challenges are institutional, in the form of government regulation and school policies and procedures. Dynamic challenges are related to young people’s cognitive development and the consequent difficulties of navigating a complex web environment.
 

"Trusting the Internet:  New Approaches to Credibility Tools" 
R. David Lankes
This chapter looks at how new approaches to credibility on the Internet can make information more credible than traditional channels. Examples from online retail to the Katrina catastrophe will be used to illustrate the way in which the Internet has the potential to revolutionize how people judge credibility.
 

"Credibility Judgments as Information Seeking Strategies and Skills"
Soo Young Rieh and Brian Hilligoss
Identifying credible information in everyday life information seeking is a challenging task for most people. This chapter examines credibility in the context of youths’ daily information problems by focusing on the relationship between credibility judgments and information seeking strategies. The results and implications of research on college students’ credibility assessment are reported. 
 

"Technological Affordances Cue Credibility Considerations" 
S. Shyam Sundar
Historically, credibility evaluations are based on source and appearance of content, but this chapter argues that four technological factors—interactivity, navigability, modality, and agency—can profoundly influence credibility judgments (made automatically while accessing information) by transmitting certain cues that trigger cognitive heuristics leading to impressions of the quality of the information.
 

"Politics, Public Policy and the Internet" 
Fred W. Weingarten
This chapter will examine the potential roles of government at all levels to in dealing with public concerns about information credibility on the Internet. We will argue that Internet public policy has been and will continue be a political negotiation between (1) a positive vision of the Internet as a crucial infrastructure for education and the nation’s economic and social well-being and (2) a negative vision of an unregulated Internet as a hostile and dangerous environment, especially for children. We will distinguish between restrictive policies that attempt to regulate or restrict access to content and supportive policies that focus on equipping users and intermediary institutions such as schools and libraries to find the information they need. We will argue that, in many domains of speech, attention could more effectively be paid to examining and developing supportive policies.