Consider the role of the expert in your own life. If you need help with tasks such as putting up a ceiling light fixture or a troubleshooting why your car won't start, what do you do? Do you try to learn enough to do it yourself or do you call someone with more expertise? You may go online to watch a video or read instructions and decide whether you have a good shot at accomplishing the project yourself. But sometimes a need is too complex or the stakes are too high to rely on someone who isn't an expert. In the video montage, you heard about some possible definitions of experts and some of the ways people might develop expertise. Remember that becoming an expert can take many years or even decades of study or experience, failure as well as success, and the patience and focus that is required to stay with a topic for that long. Our lives can move so fast and we're inundated with so many different types of information, much of which is created without careful deliberation, planning, or resourcefulness. Experts can help provide the very slow and careful process of researching, validating, consensus building, that are necessary not only to help us make important decisions, but also to explore and understand our world. Thus placing a high value on experts is good for us as individuals and good for society as a whole. But what about authority? Not all the information you consume is going to be written by experts. How can you begin to decide what information is authoritative enough for a particular need? What is authority anyway? Of the many definitions of authority in the Oxford English Dictionary, one interesting definition is, "The power to inspire belief in the truth of something." This definition showcases in multiple facets of authority. Authoritative information is not only about the presence of truth, but also about making the truth believable. Information that is authoritative then, contains useful knowledge, the truth of something, but it is also presented within a context that is empowered to spread the knowledge by inspiring believe. This means there are aspects of credibility and authority that are perceived qualities, and you have to decide what combination of elements need to be present in a piece of information for truth to be perceived, believed, and accepted. That is, for it to be authoritative. When you think about authority, you might think directly about the idea of authorship, and especially the expertise and credibility of the creator of a piece of information. For example, if you think about wanting to quote an authoritative figure in the field of astronomy, you might think of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, or Stephen Hawking. Their celebrated books and important positions, mean that you are more likely to believe them when they tell you about the universe. Sources authored by experts such as scholars, scientists, researchers, or practitioners, tend to carry a high level of authority, and this is why peer reviewed or scholarly articles which are sources that embrace all scholarship as a conversation amongst experts in the field are are so biased. But in today's world where there is so much information, misinformation, and false information available at our fingertips, it is critical to be able to make distinctions when scholarly articles aren't part of the mix as they so often are not. So it's important to think about how your assessment of the authority of a piece of information might need to go beyond the question of who the creator is. For example, you might need to think about when the piece of information was created, this could be a particular time of day or a particular year or a particular historical period. Can you figure out why the information was created? Can you figure out the format of the information? This is like the container that's holding the information. Examples might include books, blog posts, YouTube videos, scholarly articles, advertisements, songs, artifacts, tweets or reports. Does that format have any implications that might impact your assessment of the authority of the piece of information? Is the information affiliated with an established incredible institution, government, or organization? What is the subject matter, and is the subject matter well suited to the other factors that you're examining? What about the style, the mood, or the character of the information? For what audience was the information originally intended? Finally, can you figure out if the information accounts for many different points of view and perspective? All of these elements among many others are a part of the context of the information under consideration and can be essential factors in assessing authority and determining the extent to which a given information source is appropriate for a particular information need or a situation. If you would like to further explore the relationship between authority and contexts, you can check out the Discussion Board activity in Section 2, that's where you'll have the opportunity to assess a tweet by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. You can find out what kinds of contexts you find important if you want to try to understand the authority of this tweet. Chances are you'll probably discover their multiple contexts to consider. Analyzing the authority of a given piece of information is a complicated task. It involves balancing many factors. You might not always automatically think about all of these different factors and the quickness of the moment, but if you can take some time to do the hard work that is often required, you can develop more awareness of the value of authority, and being yourself closer to achieving metaliteracy.
