[To appear in Chris Bigum, Colin Lanshear, et al., eds., Digital Rhetorics: New Technologies, Literacy, and Learning - Current Practices and New Directions (Canberra, Department of Employment, Education, Training, and Youth Affairs/Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology, forthcoming).]
Nicholas C. Burbules
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign
Thomas A. Callister, Jr.
Department of Education
Whitman College
This essay explores two issues concerning the Internet which are often discussed separately, but which we believe are intimately related: issues of access, or who can use the Internet (who can afford a computer, who can get an on-line connection, who knows how to operate the software, and so on) and issues of credibility (who can make sense of what they find on the Internet, who can judge what is and isn't worthwhile, who can gain credibility and visibility as an information provider). Both of these issues, access and credibility, have a dual dimension: issues involved with reading and making use of information sources; and issues involved with providing information. Users who cannot participate effectively across the full range of opportunities that the Internet represents cannot be said to have "access," even if they have a computer and on-line connection; users who cannot gain a hearing for their ideas and point of view or who cannot discern what is and isn't worthwhile, lack "credibility" and the means to evaluate the credibility of what they find.1
The stakes of this problem have never been higher. Today we face the prospect that those who can work (and have fun) in cyberspace those who have access to its resources and feel comfortable learning and interacting there will benefit from a substantially different range of experiences and opportunities in life than those who do not. Effective on-line strategies will provide users with news, information, educational opportunities, employment prospects, avenues of political participation, cultural experiences, and opportunities for social interaction that will be significantly different from those who do not participate in this domain. As providers of information, those who reside there will be visible and potentially influential within a global network of communication and information-sharing; they will possess a cyber-identity in relation to others on-line that can supplement their face-to-face interactions and experiences; they can participate within broader communities constituted partly through the sharing of information and points of view. Moreover, these opportunities interact and reinforce one another: the more active and present people are in this environment, the more they stand to gain in terms of learning to use the network for their own purposes. Hence the cycles of information and further opportunities become self-perpetuating; someone not part of this network will fall further and further behind in even knowing what they are missing.
Here we discuss these dual aspects (access and credibility) in relation to one another. Being able to discern and gain credibility is an access issue: it could be termed a question of quality of access, as opposed of quantity of access. Yet, even the apparently more straightforward issue of access itself is not as straightforward as it appears.2
Issues of Access
Access to the Internet and its vast resources is generally considered a technical problem. In the United States, for example, state and federal officials have announced ambitious plans to put "every school on the Internet." Such pursuits, despite their merit, interpret issues of access in an overly narrow way. It is obvious enough that merely solving the technical problems of putting classrooms (or homes, for that matter) "on-line" will be insufficient if prospective users do not also have an opportunity to develop the skills and attitudes necessary to take advantage of those resources. Yet there are even deeper and less apparent criteria that determine actual access. Elsewhere Burbules has suggested the terms "conditions of access" and "criteria of access" to draw attention to this general sort of problem: conditions of access are the features of a situation that enable or restrict participation in it; criteria of access are the personal characteristics that people require in order actually to gain access.3 These two factors are interdependent, since the existence of certain conditions entail certain criteria; just as the possession of certain criteria can compensate for or overcome certain conditions.
In the case of educational technologies, policy makers have focused too much on the conditions of access and too little on the criteria of access. Identifying criteria of access is difficult, because often the criteria entailed by a situation are implicit, not readily apparent; very often they are unintended. Left-handed people frequently discover that right-handedness is a criterion of access for all sorts of activities that no one planned to restrict their access to.
In this section, we will discuss a few of these more subtle, tacit features of interacting with computer technologies that end up restricting access. These will carry us through four levels of providing access, of which the technical is only the first. Addressing these issues, if we are serious about providing access to a wide range of people, will require a much broader educational commitment than simply buying new equipment or teaching a few workshops to help people learn to use it. Certainly we need to do this. But certain implicit requirements for the effective and beneficial use of these technologies are just as indispensable as wires and equipment - and some of them might be much more difficult to change or compensate for.
Moreover, there are criteria of access that arise due to basic features of the digital environment itself; they cannot be "compensated for," because they are partly constitutive of what we are trying to provide access to. In such cases actual access will not have been achieved, and a significant number of people will have little or no opportunity to benefit from the resources and experiences that computer environments provide.
Technical Access
The challenge of providing technical access, we want to make clear, is hardly simple or straightforward itself. Where many areas, especially when we are thinking internationally, lack even electricity or telephone service, the idea of having everyone plug into the Internet and surf World Wide Web sites is rather laughable. And given such conditions of scarce resources, how exactly should societies weigh such prospective high tech benefits alongside roads, water and sewer systems, health care, and decent food supplies? The mania over getting "wired" is a luxury built on top of many other luxuries that a significant number of people worldwide cannot even dream about.
For poor schools, or schools in impoverished areas, these trade-offs are especially vicious. In buildings that are dilapidated or substandard in other ways, it will (ironically) be even more expensive to provide them with adequate wiring and technical hookups, as well as computers; and these schools are already underfunded relative to their needs. So new funding, even where it is allocated, may be even more seriously needed for other, more pedestrian purposes (books, heating systems, decent toilets, and so forth) - or, more realistically, given fiscal constraints and priorities, it will come de facto out of funds that might have been allocated for those other purposes. How will such funding choices be made, given the "cost-benefit" thinking of most state agencies? How will impoverished schools manage the intolerable dilemmas of allocating such funds? Will a school that expends resources on new technologies be, ironically, worse off overall as a place to learn?
A different aspect of technical access is raised by considering disabled citizens. Here is a clear instance where conditions of access, quite unintentionally, create significant barriers for many prospective users. The decision to base the computer interface on a moveable "mouse" is a problem for many with physical limitations. Screen technologies are not adequate to the needs of many with visual impairments, and so on. In this area, there has been an impressive amount of research and development, we will say, and there are many ingenious attempts to compensate for a wide range of disabilities. But the current costs of these devices and adaptations are very high.
Moreover, even when a large investment is made to lay in a basic technical system, soon after it is up and running new innovations surpass it - and upgrading to take advantage of new potentialities often means undoing or redoing what were expensive investments in the first place (such as the continually accelerating speeds of computers and network connections). Any large-scale system investment is sure to be superseded soon after it is put in place; so there will inevitably be a lag time between what most users have and can afford, and what a smaller, more privileged group will be able to take advantage of. The crucial paradox here is that the larger and more inclusive an attempt is to put all schools (or all homes) on-line, the more expensive it will be to have to upgrade it (more likely, it will be left in place and accepted as second-rate, but good enough).
Skills, Attitudes, and Dispositions of Access
It is not surprising to note that having machines does little good if people do not know how to use them. And workshops in effective use need to be a part of any full-fledged program devoted to access. But acquiring the skills of access remains only part of the problem, and not the most challenging part. For there are dispositions and attitudes that also determine effective use, and these may be much harder to develop in people through workshops, and so forth. Contrasting dispositions and attitudes may be characteristic of certain types of people, or groups, and may be related to qualities that they do not wish to change or abandon. A certain level of facility and confidence is probably gained only through experience on-line itself (which makes the circles of inclusion and exclusion self-perpetuating once again).
For example, many access issues have to do with interface design. Although new computer interfaces based on graphic icons, pull-down menus, and analogies with physical objects (such as the trash can) have become more intuitive and require less specific coded knowledge, effective use still involves a number of shortcuts, heuristics, and experience-based conventions that not everyone knows. And the spread of tacit knowledge about such shortcuts, heuristics, and conventions generally travels within the communities of people who already have access to the Internet and have a context for making sense of them. Changes in operating systems, new iterations of software programs, and other changes in technology occur so quickly that a person not actively engaged on a regular basis just barely manages to get a sense of what is going on about the time that this information becomes superseded by something better, faster, and more useful.
Furthermore, though computer operating systems and software are becoming in many ways easier to use, operating these programs is becoming enormously complex: their operation assumes not only knowledge about the program, but substantial knowledge as well about what it can do and what others have been able to do with it. Moreover, to the extent that there are distinct styles of human thought, the forms of thinking manifested in the workings of computer interfaces and software, the structure of the Web, and so forth may be more hospitable to the way certain people organize information or communicate. Computer programs, today, are highly customizable, but not infinitely so: they incorporate certain basic assumptions and decisions about problem-solving and the likely needs of users - to this extent they inevitably privilege certain ways of thinking over others.
For example, the basic architecture of the Web is built around the idea of "hypertext," a set of pages and information resources (numbering now in the millions of pages) all connected together by clickable links that carry us from one to another. Elsewhere, we have examined the nature of this environment, within which one "navigates" from information point to information point, often in a nonlinear, nonhierarchical manner.4 Part of the exciting appeal of the Web is this continually evolving, "rhizomatic" structure; but in the actual practice of exploring this labyrinth, users especially novices go through the experience of getting lost, of not being able to relocate information they had found, or of simply being overwhelmed by the volume of what is available on-line.
Navigating the Web, or learning the capabilities of new software, requires that a user feel comfortable inhabiting a complex environment. Inhabiting such a complex environment means living with a good deal of uncertainty; with the occasional feeling of being lost; with the need to make connections as one goes. These are not only matters of learning and experience, but also matters of confidence and attitude, and we have not given enough thought to the ways in which environments that feel exciting and challenging to some users are experienced as chaotic and frustrating by others.
Add to this the other main feature of the Web, its multimedia capability, and you have the conditions for a real cacophony. For those of us with a fair amount of experience already in computer environments, dealing with graphics, video, and sound, these capabilities raise exciting possibilities. We scroll quite casually through long lists of options; we feel comfortable sampling (sometimes randomly) what we find; we have developed fairly sophisticated tacit strategies for screening and selecting what is worth our while. It may be harder for us, then, to appreciate how overwhelming all of this can appear to new users; and for those inclined to be intimidated by "high tech" anyway, this very richness and complexity becomes, not an attraction, but another reminder of previous feelings of inadequacy.
It is very illuminating to spend time teaching workshops or giving informal assistance to people who know very little about computers or the Internet and what they can do. Oversimplifying, one encounters two sorts of novices. Some, when they encounter an unfamiliar problem, when they are "stuck," feel quite comfortable just messing around, trying things out, guessing at what might work. In doing so, they not only have a chance of working their way out of the problem, but of possibly discovering new capabilities of the system they are using. It turns out that "just messing around" is an indispensable approach for users at all levels of sophistication. But others do not find this easy to do.
And this is not simply a matter of confidence and experience. At a deeper level, we are talking about an orientation to the world, and especially an orientation to machines, that allows the user to experiment with different options, to explore alternatives without always knowing what their effects will be. It may be easier to do this in contexts with which we are familiar and in which we feel generally comfortable; but even then some people simply do not have a very high tolerance for uncertainty, for frustration, for trial-and-error. Because the actual operation of computer programs is a rigorously logical procedure, and because most (non-game) software is developed to be used in a very orderly way, educators often make the mistake of thinking that, developmentally, this is also how people should be brought along to effective computer use. But in fact such an approach ends up limiting access because it does not prepare novices very well for situations in which something is not working as expected and the manual is not available. For many computer users, this causes them to stay within the rigid bounds of what is familiar, continuing to do "what works" without running the risk of encountering the unexpected, even when that means that they are only exploring a very small portion of what is available to them. So we see, for example, people who prefer to use outdated machines or software rather than change over to something that might actually do more for them.
Pragmatic Access
Beyond these issues are the circumstances of social life that actually influence who has the time and opportunity to engage in work and play on-line, and who does not. These "pragmatics" of access are a source of concern because they systematically advantage certain groups, defined by social class, sex, and race or ethnicity, over others. Hence the overall pattern of their effects is not evenhanded across the board: they have consequences that are easily discernible in the patterns of Web use statistics.
Having time is a criterion of access. Because so much of new technologies have been marketed on the basis of increasing efficiency or productivity, there is a widespread belief that having these machines saves time. Any computer user knows that isn't so simply true. While it is often possible to do specific things more quickly, there is a significant amount of time spent on setting things up, trouble-shooting, figuring out new shortcuts, and so forth - arrangements that we think will save us time on some future occasion. Well, maybe. Our point here is that not everyone has the amount of time, or the discretion in how they allocate their time, that others do. In schools, in the workplace, in the home, these divisions do not work out equitably.
When you start spending time on-line, if you have any enthusiasm for it at all, you find that, of course, it takes up much more of your time. But people still persist in thinking that with just a little investment of start-up time, those without much time on their hands will come to discover vast new quantities of time that will be freed up to spend on-line. Who has the time to sort through the chaff of material on the Internet to find the grains of enjoyable, worthwhile, information or personal interaction? As in others areas of human endeavor, quality time requires quantity time.
Related to this point is the nature of work, the locations of work, and the flexibility of work schedules that are experienced by different persons. Someone working in a university or company with a computer on every desk, networked directly into the Internet, experiences access issues in a different way than someone working on an assembly line, or on a farm. Someone working at home, raising children and managing a household, experiences a different structure of time and scheduling, and may have less time that can be devoted to the Internet, even if a computer and modem are sitting in the corner of the home.
For many computer users, privacy issues and feeling safe from harassment are major concerns.5 Who chooses to participate in public forums and discussion groups? Who feels safe having their e-mail address made public? Who is willing to have their photo on their Web page? Who feels comfortable with the particular kinds of communication the Internet makes possible? Clearly these concerns will affect some persons and groups more than others.
Issues of Form and Content as Issues of Access
As should be clear from what has already been discussed, what users find on the Internet is also itself a factor in who participates, how they participate, and how much they participate. These become tacit criteria of inclusion and exclusion as well.
There is a great deal on the Internet that ranges from the trivial, to the silly, to the bizarre, to the outrageous, to the offensive.6 It is easy enough to say that this comes with the decentralization and open, uncensored medium the Internet has evolved into; and we along with many others would say this openness is among its virtues. But a consequence of this is that particular experiences or encounters on the Internet may be profoundly disturbing, or worse, for some people - and there is no minimizing the harmful effects these can have. Some people leave and never come back; others continue to live and work in cyberspace, but within much more cautious and narrowly drawn boundaries. On the surface these choices to withdraw from access may appear "voluntary" and self-imposed, but on another, deeper, level they are choices engendered by constraints that are not of people's choosing, which affect different groups of participants and individuals in different ways. In addition, the hypertext structure of the Web is experienced differently by different users; some can work through in lateral as well as linear lines of association; others find them confusing or counterintuitive. Similarly, the content of Web pages or discussion groups will attract and fascinate some, frustrate and offend others. These questions of form and content, then, introduce important access issues.
It is also worthwhile to reflect on some of the implicit features of on-line communication itself. Once again, for those of us who spend a great deal of time using this technology, many of these features have become invisible, second nature to us - we may even think they are necessary or inevitable. They are not; and considering some of these features may remind us that what we have come to accept as easy or natural may appear otherwise to new users, and may constitute an active barrier or discouragement to their involvement.
We want to mention briefly here five features of on-line communication that are not neutral in their nature and effects. We will present them as dyads, because we want to emphasize that within each pair there are clear advantages on either side of the choice; and that what will be seen as an advantage by one person will be seen as a disadvantage by another. Where computer systems have adopted one aspect over the other, it has created an environment that some will see as ideal, others as problematic or, worse, unwelcoming and alien.
(1) Computer networks allow both synchronous ("real time") and asynchronous communication. Chat groups work on the first principle, e-mail on the second (you do not need to worry if the recipient is there when you send an e-mail message; it is there and waiting whenever they check in). Each approach has advantages, each fosters a distinctive style of communication - distinctive kinds of writing (length of messages, use of questions, and so forth). But not all particular computer setups allow both styles; asynchronous links make much lighter demands on limited equipment. What sorts of people will prefer each type? Who will feel the advantages of one approach as a disadvantage to them ? For example, if English is not my native language, I may prefer a system that allows me a longer time to formulate and correct my response before sending it. For a different sort of person (or given certain subject matters), the lapse in time between sending a message and receiving a reply (if a reply comes at all) will feel like a risk they do not want to make, and they prefer to remain silent, or drop out of the exchange entirely.
(2) The conventions of on-line communication do not require one to disclose one's name or identity; one's return address can be a word or nickname or meaningless string of letters or numbers. In face-to-face communication, of course, we usually receive a good deal of information about the person with whom we are speaking. What are the advantages and disadvantages of on-line anonymity? On the one hand, does it enable those who are shy or intimidated to participate more by allowing them privacy? Does it mean that people must react to the content of what others say, and not to the color of their skin, their sex, and so forth, which are not visible in their digital persona (unless identified in some way by their return address or on-line name)? Or, on the other hand, does it allow people to fraudulently hide their identity, misleading others as to who they are and where they might be positioned relative to a particular discussion? Does it allow people to make irresponsible statements that they do not need to be held accountable for, since their (real) name and identity are not attached to what they write? Or does this actually promote greater frankness by permitting socially unpopular views to be said openly, whereas before they were merely thought, but repressed from comment because of a fear of social retribution? (Maybe sometimes social retribution is a good thing.)
For example, at a recent conference one speaker was describing a university class discussing on-line the politics of requiring California teachers to report on "illegal" immigrant children in their classrooms (many of whom are Hispanic). Participants in the discussion were identified only by a letter code, not by name. One of the participants to the discussion was Hispanic, and clearly might have had a distinctive perspective on the issue - perhaps, one might even say, she had a different authority to take a stand on it. But no one in the discussion knew that participant "D-4" (say) was speaking from that position. Is this a good thing for open dialogue, or a detriment? Should it be left up to that person to choose whether to identify herself, or should some of that information, while still protecting anonymity, have been made public? Would she have participated at all under those conditions? Our point here is that as these decisions are made in different contexts, decisions are also being (tacitly) made about who will have access, and how they will participate.
(3) Another feature of on-line communication, as in the example just mentioned, is whether messages are sent to a collective, "public" group (as in a listserv or a chat room), or as specific person-to-person messages. In ordinary speaking situations, the same distinction arises, of course. What sorts of communications are fostered by each format and, again, who will feel comfortable with each? When do public messages become communiquŽs; and who will not wish to speak in such pronouncements? Who, in fact, will prefer face-to-face contact in all their communicative interactions, and find the impersonality of the on-line world fundamentally alienating? Are there cultural groups for whom the presence of facial expressions, bodily gestures, and so forth, are indispensable elements in conversation?
(4) Following on that point, for now on-line communication is still mostly in writing (although voice and voice-and-video links are becoming better quality, easier to use, and less expensive to incorporate into networked systems). But written and spoken communication obviously have different forms, different conventions, and different effects. Issues of ability and disability arise again in this context; for some, spoken communication is not possible at all; for others it is the only alternative since they cannot use a keyboard or mouse. In some languages, and for certain cultures, tonal features of utterances is inseparable from meaning. To make the point more generally, writing is not simply speech on paper (or on screen); what is gained and what is lost in each medium, and who will feel such gain or loss especially acutely?
(5) Finally, within the scope of writing itself new sub-forms are emerging. As the use of hypertext, discussed previously, becomes woven into the capabilities of all word processors and e-mail programs, a new distinction between predominantly linear writing on-line and branched, complex, interwoven "hypertextual" writing will create yet another feature of on-line communication that will be received by different people quite differently. Forms of thinking, features of syntax in different languages, and the intentions, problems, and purposes people bring to on-line communication will all influence whether this new hypertextual environment is a boon or a chaotic nightmare.
In all of these communicative settings, we have tried to make clear, decisions about access are implicit. They are often not considered as such, however, and the result is that choices that are made and locked into place by system capabilities (choices sometimes made because of cost constraints) end up having subtle and not-so-subtle consequences for who can use them, or will want to use them, and who will not.
Now, as noted, these implicit criteria of access (and others that could be extended from this analysis) are not held generally by people, nor will they be developed with equal facility by different types of people. Such factors are characteristic to different degrees of members of different ethnic, racial, class, and gender groups. In many cases the "lack" of such characteristics will not be remedied easily; and as noted this may not even be felt to be a lack by persons who are reluctant to give up or change what they consider to be important aspects of their identity and approach to the world. This makes the provision of access to technological environments a much deeper puzzle than simply the provision of hardware and software. We need to think about this problem in ways that do not assume that all users are the same; or that blames them when they are different.
What this discussion shows is that the question of "access" in a general way cannot be separated from an examination of what we are trying to give access to.7 When the very experiences and opportunities that some find desirable are seen as much less attractive to others, what is the obligation of society to change aspects of the content often at the cost of other values - when those aspects are seen to be barriers to access for certain citizens? Conversely, does society put certain people or groups in a no-win situation when it asks them to put up with experiences or content that for them might be uncomfortable, disturbing, or worse, for the sake of other purported benefits?
We see, then, four related levels of the issue of access and equity. First is the provision of technical access - an expensive and complicated proposition in itself. Second is the development of general skills, attitudes, and dispositions that are necessary for effective use of that equipment. Third is the complex interrelation of pragmatic conditions of access and criteria of access - examining the circumstances that differentiate, in practice, who can actually make productive use of new technologies and who cannot. Fourth are issues of access raised by the very nature of the environment to which we are trying to provide access; characteristics that might not be changeable, or that grow out of the very benefits that (for some users) make that environment valuable. The challenge of the first two levels of access is itself a complex, costly undertaking - a price that we doubt society and educational institutions are truly prepared to pay. The third and fourth levels raise deeper conceptual and practical paradoxes that may not be "solvable" in any apparent way. Such considerations carry us deeper and deeper into reflections about the nature and purported benefits of the Internet itself, and how it may be experienced differently by different groups, rather than taking the benefits of new technologies as a given, and thinking solely about the problem of how to get more people involved with them.
Issues of Credibility
The relation between access issues and credibility issues is already implicit in the preceding discussion. One way of framing this question is, "What kind of access is worth having?" The interrelation of issues of access and issues of content shows that a major barrier to effective access will be an inability or unwillingness to sort through and evaluate the enormous volume of material the Internet makes available (on the one hand) or the inability to gain a voice and presence as a contributor of information, ideas, and a point of view (on the other). We are calling these issues of credibility: of assessing credibility, in the first instance, and of gaining credibility, in the second.
Assessing Credibility
As anyone who has used the Internet knows, the volume of information, voices, viewpoints, and opinions, some of them worthwhile and many not, can be overwhelming. A keyword search on the Web might pull up hundreds of thousands of references. An ordinary discussion group might generate dozens of messages per day. Unsolicited advertisements and messages come as soon as one's e-mail address is added to certain lists. These experiences are not unlike those encountered through other media (ordinary mail, telephones, cable television, newspapers and magazines, etc.), but the volume and speed of proliferating information points in the Internet is truly unprecedented. A user who cannot discern what is useful, what is believable, what is interesting, what is important, will literally be overwhelmed; over time such users will either leave out of frustration, will squander a great deal of time sorting through trivia or unreliable junk, or (perhaps worst of all) will begin to lose the capability or patience to make such discriminations, regarding all on-line materials with a certain leveling of expectations - either too uniformly high or too uniformly low.
As a result, developing a critical capacity to read selectively, filter, and evaluate information on-line is one of the central educational problems raised by these new information technologies. Elsewhere we have termed this capability "hyperreading," not only finding and reading what is on the Internet, but learning to make one's own connections in what one finds there, to question the connections (the "links") that others provide, and to interrogate the silences or absences of the Internet: what is not there (or who is not there).8
Assessing credibility sometimes means having sufficient knowledge in an area to evaluate the information provided (though if someone knows that much already, they might need the information less than someone who knows less). If a person can independently judge that certain claims are valid, they are more likely to grant credence to other claims from the same source. Most often, however, people will not have this independent basis of judgment.
When users lack an independent expertise, assessing credibility will mean examining the sources of on-line information, and judging who they are (whether individuals, groups, or institutions): What experience or qualifications do they hold relative to the material they are providing? What interests do they have relative to promoting certain information and points of view over others? What space do they provide for users to interpret the information differently than they do? Have they been reliable in the information or viewpoints they've offered in the past?
A special case of judging credibility is when others are entrusted to make the judgments on one's behalf: editors or archivists who travel the Internet, find material, collect, filter, and organize it, and make it available in a useable form for others (via a newsletter, a journal, a Web site, etc.). Clearly, the question of credibility in this case is transferred to the person, group, or institution who is making the judgments on others' behalf; and there are just as many reasons to be skeptical about the qualifications, biases, and blind spots of these authorities. Yet their status is likely to become more and more important as the Internet grows. It will simply be impossible, from the standpoint of expertise or time, for individuals to perform these jobs entirely for themselves across the full range of interests that concern them. In certain areas, at least, they will rely on editors or archivists to make these selections and evaluations on their behalf. The sole protection against monolithic or exclusionary points of view, then, will be in maintaining a diverse number of people, groups, or institutions performing this service (in part so that their results can be compared). As the Internet stands now, the structure of access is relatively unregulated and decentralized, so that many different people and agencies are performing this function (for any significant topic, there are likely to be many pages collecting and providing information). This becomes, then, a major reason to be concerned about moves to centralize the Internet, to limit the number of information providers, to introduce prohibitive financial barriers to becoming an active provider or consumer of information, or to create one and only one gateway to the Internet.
A different dimension of credibility is in the links to and from a resource: when one person links to or cites another, there is a reciprocal transfer of credibility. Jones authorizes Smith by recommending their statements, their writings, their Web page, and so forth, and transfers some of their credibility to Smith. Yet Jones also gains (or loses) credibility by citing Smith's materials. The web of links that constitutes the Internet (especially the Word Wide Web itself) is a vast network of relations of credibility: the people who establish active links to reliable information, and whose information or viewpoints are in turn identified and recommended by others, gain credibility both as users of information and as providers of it (another way in which these dynamics are linked). We might call this network a system of "distributed credibility." There is a degree to which our traditional criteria of credibility have been closely tied to the qualifications and characteristics of particular agents. But on the Internet users may not always be able to identify the particular agents who originally provided some piece of information. In such a case, judgments of credibility must rely wholly on the avenues through which that information was gained, the links others (who are better known) have made to that information, the frequency with which that information has been accessed (counters on Web pages that record the number of visitors to a page), etc. That these are indirect and imperfect measures of credibility must be emphasized, but they may be all that users have; they represent one more way in which this new information environment challenges some of our traditional ideas about how to gain and evaluate information.
Gaining Credibility
In part, many of the questions of how one gains credibility are the inverse of those mentioned under assessing credibility: How to gain an Internet presence; how to acquire the marks of institutional or personal authority; how to get others to link to or recommend one's information or viewpoints; and so on.
One important dimension of this process (and, again, an access issue of a sort) is acquiring the skills to be become an information provider, such as learning to create a Web page or Web site and make it available to others, so that a person can publish their own writings, with or without the imprimatur of editors. One can gather information from other sources and become an editor or archivist themselves. One can collect links and make their own site a resource that endorses and promotes the information sources that they want to make more visible. Yet there is another aspect of these skills: the more that one knows about creating Web resources, the better one's position to evaluate the resources of others. One can appreciate the qualities of good design; one can differentiate flash for the sake of flash from more imaginative and beneficial uses of graphics or multimedia; most of all one can see through potentially superficial markers of importance (blinking items on a Web pages, for example), to make more independent judgments of importance and quality for one's self.
Access and Credibility
What these discussions of access and credibility reveal is that there is a continuum of activity and passivity in access. Some users simply "surf," looking through what is there, browsing, exploring with a certain degree of randomness. There can be real use in doing this sometimes, and pleasures as well. But as a single mode it is limited and runs the danger of superficiality and a "consumer" orientation to the information one finds. A critical reader of information, a "hyperreader," is more actively asking questions about what they find and what they don't find; is continually making comparisons and judgments about credibility; is going beyond what browsing reveals to find what may be hidden or implicit behind what is apparent. An active provider of information, a writer, an archivist, or an editor, is using the networked relations of the Internet to gain credibility, to publish their own ideas and viewpoints, and to sponsor the ideas and viewpoints of others.
Yet these capabilities are not simply a consequence of the characteristics of individuals; they are not simply criteria of access or credibility that can be taught or provided to people. As we have stressed repeatedly, they are also conditions of access, outgrowths of the form and content of the Internet as an existing structure. Hence, issues of centralization or decentralization; issues of regulation; issues of censorship; issues of commercialization; issues of privacy; and issues of global availability are all factors that will have specific consequences for who will and will not have access to this new information environment. While there are important educational challenges raised by questions of access and credibility, they will be for naught if the structure and circumstances of the Internet itself, including the explicit and tacit conditions and of access to it, are such that practically speaking effective access for some individuals, groups, or regions of the world is meaningless.
These issues, therefore, raise a number of challenges for societies committed to providing people with the means to a successful life. Some of these challenges (but only some) are educational in nature. They have implications not only for schooling, but for learning opportunities before and beyond the school years; the Internet makes the ideal of "lifelong learning" a feasible reality. There is an important educational dimension to developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of access; the critical capacities that will allow users to make effective discriminations of credible and worthwhile information once it is found; and the strategies of becoming an effective and visible information provider as well. But the stakes here are not only educational; as noted before, they also concern employment opportunities, access to cultural and entertainment resources, to social interactions, and, increasingly, to political information and participation as well. Citizens excluded, or alienated, from this new environment will find themselves cut off from many other opportunities. Neglect of these issues will, over time, create a two-tiered society, an "information caste society," that, once in place, will be as intractable and self-perpetuating as any that human society has yet witnessed.
Existing metaphors that have helped to conceive and organize society, such as "public" and "private" spaces, and related notions of communication, community, political participation, credibility, personal identity, and relations to others, are all being transformed by the increasing prevalence of computer technologies in our lives. As computers, telephones, televisions, and other media all begin to blend into new, combined technologies, the ways in which we have thought about how people communicate, how they send, receive, and interpret information, how they relate to one another, will have to change - which means that our ideas about "education" will have to change. Without a doubt, the physical locations we call schools and classrooms will have to change; and they will become less exclusively the spaces where certain kinds of learning are possible. (If they do not change, they will become social welfare holding tanks for those student populations with no other alternative.) Each of these changes brings potential benefits, and dangers. What disturbs us is that the benefits, for some, inherently become the dangers, for others.
Such access and credibility issues have, in our view, not yet received the attention they deserve. We who have the greatest stake in these technologies and who use them the most, who have generally free, unlimited access through our school or universities, who often have upgraded equipment purchased for us, who have a fair amount of latitude in how we structure and allocate our time, are not always in the best position to anticipate the problems of those who see these technological changes from afar, with merely a glimpse now and then of what they are missing.
As educators, we are supposed to be more reflective than most people about the ways in which we can intentionally create learning experiences and opportunities that expand the scope of human possibility. We are also supposed to worry about those left out of these experiences and opportunities. Now is the time to begin to take these questions seriously: What forms are new educational technologies taking, and what forms are we taking along with them? Who is the "we" that is included here; and who is not being included? The answers, we hope to have suggested, are far from simple or obvious, and the early indications are not entirely encouraging.
New technologies of communication and information-sharing are drawing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, influencing to a substantial degree the amount and kind of interactions that take place between people. The great trap of new technology is when it is simply defined as a means of convenience: Do what you used to do, faster, easier, cheaper! It never works out that way. Adopting new technologies changes what we want to do, what we try to do, what we see it to be possible to do. Success or satisfaction remain sometimes within reach, sometimes just out of reach, now as always. Technology doesn't solve any problem without creating a new one. So whatever we think we are trying to accomplish educationally with these new technologies, we will inevitably end up discovering that we have achieved something quite different instead.*
2 It is important to add here that access to the Internet is not the only educational problem of access. There are advantages to be gained from other living and learning environments also, and we do not mean to contribute to the hype about "cyberspace" as the new learning frontier. Users can spend too much time in this space and too little outside it; and this becomes a disadvantage in learning also.
3 Nicholas C. Burbules, Brian Lord, and Ann Sherman, "Equity, equal opportunity, and education," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 4 No. 2 (1982): 169-187.
4 See Nicholas C. Burbules and Thomas A. Callister, Jr., "Knowledge at the crossroads: Alternative futures of hypertext environments for learning," Educational Theory, vol. 46 no. 1 (1996): 23-50 and Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear, "Critical literacy and digital texts," Educational Theory, vol. 46 no. 1 (1996): 51-70. See also Ilana Snyder, Hypertext: The electronic labyrinth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996).
5 For more on privacy issues, see Nicholas C. Burbules, "Privacy, surveillance, and classroom communication on the Internet," forthcoming, Access.
6 Nicholas C. Burbules, "Misinformation, Malinformation, Messed-Up Information, and Mostly Useless Information: How to Avoid Getting Tangled Up in the 'Net."
7 See, for example, Jane Kenway, "Backlash in cyberspace and why 'girls need modems,'" in Leslie Roman and Linda Eyre, eds. Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Equality and Difference (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
8 See Burbules and Callister, "Knowledge at the crossroads"; Nicholas C. Burbules, "Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and critical literacy," Page to Screen: Taking Literacy Into the Electronic Era, Ilana Snyder, ed. (New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, forthcoming); and Burbules, "Misinformation, Malinformation, Messed-Up Information, and Mostly Useless Information," this volume.
* Preliminary versions of this essay were presented in Australia at Griffith University, Deakin University, Geelong, Central Queensland University, Queensland University of Technology, and Macquarie University. We would like to thank colleagues at these universities for their insightful comments and suggestions about this project. Preliminary versions of parts of this essay were published as Nicholas C. Burbules and Thomas A. Callister, Jr., "Access to new educational technologies: Democratic challenges." Critical Forum (forthcoming) and Nicholas C. Burbules and Thomas A. Callister, Jr., "Issues of access and equity for new educational technologies." Insights, Vol. 32 No. 1 (June 1996): 9-11. Research support for this current version was provided by the project on Technology and Language and Literacy Learning: Current Practices and Future Directions (Canberra, Australia: Department of Employment, Education, Training, and Youth Affairs), and we wish to thank Colin Lankshear and Chris Bigum especially for arranging this funding.