Information. In this day and age, the Internet makes it possible for anyone to access it from any computer anywhere in the world. Along with that ability to access information comes the potentiality to add and/or edit to that pool of knowledge to fit one’s own view or to correct previous knowledge that has been proven wrong.
The concept of controlling information is nothing new: China and North Korea are famous for having strict control over information that their citizens can access and politicians and people of high backgrounds commonly employ this tactic to maintain their public image or to do damage control when unpleasant knowledge about them is released.
However, in his brief summary of the history of preserving information, William Badke points out in Chapter 1 of Research Strategies that controlling information is not a recent phenomenon: the practice can be traced back to the transition of orally preserving knowledge to writing them. The elite literate realized the advantages of the transition: knowledge would no longer be limited to those who were deemed trustworthy with preserving them and had good memory and their ability to read and/or write allowed them to determine what knowledge was worthy of being preserved and what wasn’t.
Bearing this in mind, one has to wonder: just how much can we truly rely on written knowledge that’s been around for years when the world made the transition from oral tradition to written documents?
Granted, to question every written document that exists for their integrity is a painstaking process at the very least. In addition, it cannot be assumed that every written document in existence is questionable: after all, primary documents exist and their authenticity is hard to question unless there is something to prompt people to think twice about them.
At best, as Badke advises, written documents should be approached with a grain of salt or an open mind: it should be remembered that there is a degree of bias to these documents since one person or a group of people had to determine if the knowledge being preserved was damaging to them. If so, they would certainly be inclined to do damage control, right?
