No one who is paying attention can fail to grasp that we are in an information firestorm. "Post-truth," "fake news," "alternate facts"-confusion escalates with every passing day. The same pieces of evidence result in differing and highly polarized interpretations. If there is a search for truth, it has become a search for personal truths, which are many and varied. Controversy over the authority of information is certainly one of the biggest challenges of our day-and a growing nightmare for those of us teaching information literacy. The critical information literacy movement that emerged in the late 1990s was supposed to help people think more intelligently about the social, political, and economic factors underlying information, and it has done well in that regard. Yet "critical information literacy" relies on critical thinking using commonly accepted tools to evaluate what we are encountering. This kind of evaluation is becoming less common in our world.
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