Assessment: Speed

According to Alvin Goldman and his epistemic criteria, the speed of a practice is how quickly it leads to true answers (Thagard, 1997). The Internet provides the user a quick way to access information online. The speed of Digg.com is aided by the Internet and fast connections to the network. Thanks to the Internet and the ever-increasing connection speeds, people can now access information with lightning speed.

Goldman and Thagard are not alone in their "need for speed." Revered librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan also saw the value of speed when searching for information. Ranganathan's 5 laws of library science cite speed as a very important consideration. Law 4 is "save the time of the reader." According to Ranganthan, saving the time of the user means providing efficient, thorough access to materials.

Virtually any practice on the Internet could be said to be speedy when compared to its manual counterpart. It is certainly faster to "google" a topic online than to look up that same topic in a series of books and encyclopedias in a library. But the user still needs to determine the truth of such information, whether that information is found online or in books. In our analysis of Digg.com, we do not claim that all information on the site is truthful. Yet true answers can be found using Digg.com. Information seekers should seek to determine the validity of the information provided for themselves. As with any research, it is helpful to identify the source of the information and apply some sort of evaluative criteria to determine the reliability. It may also be helpful to consult more than one source when researching a topic.

That being said, Digg.com still meets the criteria for speed in an epistemic evaluation. Digg.com serves as a speedy way to access information. The information is organized into categories and can be easily located using the search feature. It takes only a matter of seconds to display answers to a query. The sources of the information are available for further investigation.