I read an interesting but slightly frustrating article in The Scotsman the other day, all about kids’ top ten favourite and least favourite things to read. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing about the emergence of blogs and lyrics websites in the favourites, and the inevitable presence of Shakespeare in the least favourite – not among the writers, funnily enough, but among the parents of the kids in question.

This is an age-old conservative reactionary mistake (we all have a conservative reactionary inside us somewhere, this is not a political dig) of confusing the medium with the content. There is nothing inherently good about a book, nor superficial about a website. There are some pretty shitty books out there, there really are, just as there are a massive number of pointless, vacuous websites. I have learned a lot recently from excellent blogs and sites written by the exact same professionals that write the books.

It is one of the things that people who lay into the online world as full of lies and fluff (which it certainly can be, I am not denying that) tend to forget: a lot of the time the actual, genuine experts cross media quite happily, often so they bring to bear the full weight of their knowledge and expertise unshackled by editors and sponsors with agendas and word counts. And then of course there are some very talented amateurs to be found as well.

Aside from that, the idea that books are inherently good because they are books is also silly. Have any of you seen some of the empty headed, badly written, poorly conceived, scantly characterised and just plain fucking inaccurate stuff that gets published? I have read some genuinely awful, awful books in my time.

Websites are interesting because they drive home what is going to become one of the central skills of the internet era: the ability to interpret the quality of information. Anyone who thought history class was pointless is suddenly going to have to think again, because the concept of primary and secondary sources and the ability to evaluate the agenda of the writer is becoming crucial. This always existed with books, but people tended to be less aware of it. Political and historical books in particular have always needed careful scrutiny for the bias of the author, and often the publisher as well.

This is even more the case with websites, not because they’re so unreliable, but because a lot of them are very good indeed. If it was all bollocks this would be obvious fairly quickly, but it’s actually the good ones that make the crap ones harder to spot.

There is some evidence that kids are getting pretty good at evaluating what they are reading (note lack of source: bad information) and I would honestly have more faith in the abilities of people who have grown up in the internet world than people who have not. Adults are proving particularly bad at critically evaluating what they are being fed online as well. Forming little echo-chambers of people who will never challenge your opinions is pretty easy on the internet, and even when people do use evidence to add weight to their views by linking to papers and studies, they are often able to lie blatantly about the contents, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever follow up.

So rather than teaching our kids that the internet is bad and books are good, or that people in chatrooms are paedophiles (honestly, it’s just not that easy to pick up teenagers in chatrooms, and believe me, I’ve tried) we should instead be focussing on a lesson absolutely all of us need to learn: how to tell the good shit from the bad shit and, when someone tells you something, to make sure that it is true. When the differences can be very subtle indeed and there is always someone with a lot to gain from fooling you, it is becoming both harder and way more important.

Eels – Old Shit/New Shit
Belle & Sebastian – Put the Book Back on the Shelf
The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Gene – Truth, Rest Your Head (Live)
Fela Kuti – Truth Don Die