Researching in the New Public Access

Whenever I think of public access television, I think of Ask Me Anything, a call-in show on a Detroit public access cable station some years back. It featured a puffy, mustachioed host who called himself Professor Quagmire and did each show in a graduation cap and gown. Local viewers would call in with questions—anything from "Why is the sky blue?" to "What does E = mc ² really mean?"—and Professor Quagmire would answer them. Sometimes his answers were well informed, even academic. Other times he would take a few basic facts and pair them with ad-lib jokes and half-truths, firing scattershot for the right answer or at least for a cheap laugh. Occasionally his responses were on target. Often they were far off the mark or downright ridiculous.

The Internet is much like Professor Quagmire: sometimes full of information, at other times merely full of it. With the same easy-access, anything-goes mentality that has long dominated the public access airwaves, the Internet has become the new epitome of free expression and unfettered information. For student researchers, this can be both a blessing and a curse. The Internet is their source of choice, offering magazines, newspapers, dictionaries, and more from the convenience of the residence hall or home. This is not always a bad thing, as on-line journals and scholarly projects provide a wealth of valuable information. The problem is that students are more familiar with the public access Internet—the home of Harry's Movie Rumor Page, the Illuminati Conspiracy Site, and Joe Bob's Big Opinion Rant Spot—and far too many students are likely to turn to these sites when they conduct research for an essay or project. They put too much faith in Professor Quagmire, and it hurts their development as researchers and writers.

I recall, for example, a student writing an essay about flaxseed oil. Her research proposal sounded intriguing, but the working bibliography of her rough draft comprised mainly public access Internet sites. Examining the bibliography more closely, I noticed that many of the sites had a home address in common, very few listed authors, and several had catchy names like "The Many Benefits of a Simple Oil" and "Flaxseed: The Healthful Choice." Curious, I visited these sites. They all touted the benefits of flaxseed oil in simple language and short paragraphs. They said everything a student looking for easy support could hope to find, and every one sported a large red link asking the reader to "ORDER NOW! SAVE 10%!" Realizing what my student had stumbled on, I made a note to discuss it with her.

When we met the next day, I keyed up the sites for her, pointed out a few telling things about them, and then showed her the home page that connected them all. She remained silent throughout, but her posture was increasingly defensive: crossed arms, straight back, and tight lips. When I told her that the sites were not appropriate for a research paper, she said simply, "They supported my hypothesis."

"Of course they would," I said. "They're selling something."

She looked at me quizzically.

"This is an advertisement," I explained.

"But it came up in the search!"

As we all know, the search engine is the most common tool on the Internet, unreliable and always overrated by the student researcher. Search engines, in their simplest form, are nothing more than word filters. No one reviews Web content before it gets listed in Google or AltaVista. Programs called "spiders" or "crawlers" visit hundreds of Web sites daily and then arbitrarily record, catalog, and store them. When a user enters a string of words, the search engine plays a match game with the pages in its memory and returns a list of links. So when, for example, I needed to track down some quick facts about the history of Jamaica recently, the first site my favorite search engine returned was a biography of Bob Marley...