Page 207 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

174 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

false accusation. Although the false information was eventually removed, this
example illustrates that a claim isn’t true just because it’s found on the Internet.
Don’t get us wrong; the Internet can be a marvelous source of information for
speakers and even textbook writers. In fact, the example of the false Wikipedia
article was found by using the search engine Google, and Seigenthaler’s rebuttal
to the article was found on the USA Today Web site. Thus, our purpose in this
chapter is not to insist that only those facts appearing on the printed page are
suitable for speeches. Quite the contrary, Surface Web-based information can
be as reliable as that appearing in printed sources—even those as reputable as the
New Republic, which is so prestigious that it is often called the in-fl ight magazine
of Air Force One. In 1998, the New Republic was forced to fi re its rising star,
Stephen Glass, when an online version of Forbes revealed that Glass had fabri-
cated a story about a 15-year-old who had hacked the Web site of Jukt Micron-

ics. It turned out that the story was entirely fictitious, right down to the name of
the company. The New Republic’s investigation revealed that Glass had fabricated
at least 27 of 41 articles. The case became the basis of a 2003 motion picture
entitled Shattered Glass. 5
It is easy to use the Internet to fi nd information on a speech topic, but it is
not as easy to fi nd information that is reliable and valid. Thus, as consumers of
information, we must exercise our own critical faculties in assessing the infor-
mation we receive from the Internet and even traditional sources, particularly
when others rely on the information we use in a speech.
We recognize that most students begin their research with the Open Inter-
net—so that is where we’ll begin. In the process, let’s see if we can improve the
process of seeking evidence for your speeches. In the following sections, we pro-
vide specifi c advice on using a wide variety of Open Internet sources, including
popular search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live Search), wikis
(such as Wikipedia), podcasts, RSS feeds, user-powered news sites, YouTube,
and blogs.

Googling

As they say on their Web site, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s in-
6
formation and make it universally accessible and useful.” Well, they certainly
have mastered the goal of accessing a lot of information. Take a popular topic
for student speeches, “global warming.” We typed those words into the general
Google search box and got about 30 million “hits.” What can you do with over
30 million sources? And how would you know which ones are reliable and which
are bogus? After all, global warming is a controversial topic for some. Thus,
Google’s very power is also its greatest limitation.
Thankfully, Google has some advanced searching tools. By clicking on the
link to “advanced” search, you can limit your search in a variety of ways. Sup-
pose we are interested in the accuracy of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, featur-
ing former Vice President Al Gore. We might narrow our search in a number
of ways. We could limit our search for sources that contained the name of the
fi lm and the word “accurate” or “inaccurate.” We could limit our search further
by also specifying we were interested in only those sources that did not use the
infl ammatory word “lie.” Although our results were still extensive when we did
exactly this, they were reduced from 30 million to a little under 70,000.