Page 121 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

108 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

Information as it relates to other information

While each topic or subject on which we might conduct research will throw up its
own specific relations between individual pieces of information, there are some
broadly applicable general 'possibilities' of relation that can assist you in reading
critically, that is, reading in a way that makes it possible to argue and explain. We
have already encountered the basis for these general possibilities in chapter 7, when
looking at the various ways in which we can reason. Using as my broad example
here, 'the impact of the Internet on Australian society', I will give some examples
of how thinking about the relationship of information to additional information
might guide our search for more material.

Relations of specific and general

We might read in an article about two successful e-commerce ventures in Australia
(call them x.com.au and y.com.au). Immediately we need to think: are these two
specific examples unusual, representative, evidence of a trend? We are seeing if there
is a relationship between the specific claim 'x and y are successful e-commerce
businesses' and a more general claim that 'there are many successful e-commerce
businesses in Australia'. We need to read additional articles/books to find out if
there are many more examples or not.
To reverse the example, we might read that, while more men use the Internet in
Australia than women, those women who are online spend more time com-
municating and less time surfing the web. We are trying to determine what kind of
computer training needs to be given to a group of elderly women at a nursing home
who are all keen to 'get online': can we relate that general information to the specific
case we are investigating? Or, perhaps, we need more detailed information on what
older women do (not just 'women'). Again, we go to a source looking specifically for
this material, based on the tentative information-relationship we have identified.

Relations of similarity and difference

We might, for example, discover that there has been a 100 per cent increase in
Internet use in Australia in the past two years. We can immediately begin to think
about the following—was this increase the same, or more or less in previous years?
Have there been similar rises in other countries recently?
Again, in a more complex example, we read that Australia was one of the
countries that most quickly (in terms of time and number of users) adopted video
recorders and mobile phones when they were introduced. There is a relationship
there: both the Internet and VCRs/phones are information/communication
technologies—can we draw some lessons from a comparison? Are they similar
enough? Too different?
A final example: we read that the Internet cannot be easily censored; we then
read another article that outlines the reasons why it can be censored effectively. The