The Hegelian inquiring system and a critical triangulation tool for the Internet information slave: A design science study

This article discusses people's understanding of reality by representations from the Internet. The Hegelian inquiry system is used here to explain the nature of informing on the Internet as activities of information masters to influence information slaves' opinions and as activities of information slaves to become well informed. The key assumption of Hegelianism regarding information is that information has no value independent from the interests and worldviews (theses) it supports. As part of the dialectic process of generating syntheses, we propose a role for information science of offering methods to critically evaluate the master's information, and by this we develop an opinion (thesis) independent from the master's power. For this we offer multiple methods for information criticism, named triangulation, which may help users to evaluate a master's evidence. This article presents also a prototype of a Hegelian information triangulator tool for information slaves (i.e., nonexperts). The article concludes with suggestions for further research on informative triangulation. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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