How do we teach authority in a culture where everyone’s an expert?

As one of the cornerstones of the CRAAP test to evaluate the validity and usefulness of sources, we rely on the idea of “authority” to inform our evaluation of the source, to decide if it is trustworthy. In the long history of authority, we’ve variously relied on royalty/aristocracy, the Church, professors/the University, the printed word, and the “cultural elite.” In today’s world, all knowledge is available to all people (who are literate and have access to technology) at the click of a mouse or the tap of a finger. The concept of authority has been destabilized and democratized. Credentials don’t matter. Authorities conflict with each other. All truth is just biased opinion. The distrust of historical sources of authority, along with the popularization of the idea of “fake news” and “fake news media”, coupled with the increasingly small number of people who read books, and the theory of confirmation bias, where we each inhabit our own bubble of information, have combined to create an almostan almost toxic (and certainly skewed) view of authority. Who needs authorities when I can find the “truth” on my own? I can crowd-source my answer. So how do we, as teachers of information literacy and critical thinking in the library and the composition classroom, combat this? We must change the conversation and must show students that authority still matters.. WWe will’d like to offer some practical applications and exercises you could can apply to your own classroom and to open up the conversation in ways that may be helpful and encourage students to think critically about who creates information