Internet Information and Academic Literacy in the Digital Age

The paper aims to analyze positive and negative characteristics of Internet information, consider the peculiarities of social and historical change of knowledge, and identify the specifics of the phenomenon of human academic literacy. In the modern information and digital age, the role and importance of information is increasing at a rate that has allowed scientists to describe the situation as the information explosion. The dramatic increase in the volume of information was made possible by the fact that a wide range of users with their personal information materials have gained access to the Internet. The speed of obtaining information has also increased; it is transmitted in real-life mode. These and many other characteristics of modern information flows can undoubtedly be assessed as positive trends, but the negative aspects of information processes are also increasing. The abundance of information gives rise to its excess and the problem of its selection. The availability of information does not guarantee its reliability; there is a lot of false, distorted information in the Internet. Analyzing whether the wide access and abundance of Internet information implies increasing academic literacy, the author concludes that people tend to become much more informed, but the path to academic literacy is becoming longer. Academic literacy is what a person learned in the course of education and what became the basis for his/her daily life and self-awareness. The excess of information creates a problem of qualitative selection, which requires additional time. The abundance of unreliable, fake information requires its careful verification. Public morals are the most important element of academic literacy, but there are virtually no filters in the Internet that block immoral information, cruelty, Internet trolling. As a result, learning by processing Internet information makes the process of creating academic literacy much more challenging and complex. Keywords: information age, information, digital technologies, academic literac