Thank you very much for the post you made to help me with starting with marxism. It certainly made me feel more motivated to keep trying my best to understand it. You also said that if needed, you could make an explanation on how to navigate websites to find bettee information, if i understood correctly, and it would be very useful and appreciated by me if you did, if it's not much trouble. Thank you once again! Hope youre doing well.
I'm really glad to hear I was able to help!
So a lot of this post is going to be tips on general computer navigation and sourcing, I will mention a few websites but I dont want to depend on specifics too much because the best sites for things change with time but most general skills stay applicable. A lot of this will also be somewhat basic, I don't know your level of your experience with computers and the internet, so just take anything helpful and leave anything that isn't helpful to you. There may be tips which are helpful for general literacy, but thats not an area I'm well equipped in, so this will be primarily about internet navigation.
First you need a browser you're comfortable with. Any browser works, but some offer different tools for collecting information, saving tabs, or blocking ads or paywalls walls, and customizing sites with extensions. Personally I recommend firefox, but there are tons of good options and even the bad options are typically functional. If you are looking for a new browser I just advise finding one thats not based on chromium, otherwise go wild.
Browsers are important for a few reasons, a lot of people are concerned about them for privacy reasons or computer performance, but the main reason I bring them up here is because of extensions. chromium browsers have a significantly more controlled environment which stops many extensions from working. On firefox there are many good adblocking extensions (ublock origin being the all you need in most cases), but there are also extensions that will customize websites, allow you to save pictures or download webpages, to save audio, and plenty of other functionality like grouping tabs in unique ways. Again though, any browser works, its just one thing to consider if you're looking to get into more intentional use of the internet, browsers are the start for that.
Next would be your search engine. Again, anything is fine, google is typically the most reliable, but the important thing here to keep in mind is that there are other engines available. Using any one engine will likely leave you with missing or skewed results. google blocks a lot of piracy and non-western information. duck duck go blocks a lot of information coming from Russia. If you're unable to find something you want, try another search engine. You can also try searx if you want, its easy to get bogged down in the behind the scenes stuff for searx but basically it allows you to select from multiple search engines and customize what results you want while aggregating (collecting) from multiple bigger search engines. It isn't a single company that runs searx(ng) but a software you can use and anyone can run, but most people find an instance someone else is hosting to use, it works very similarly to mastodon on fedi if you're familiar.
As for actually using a search engine, this part will have a bit more detail behind it. Many search engines have special characters and tricks you can use to get very specific results, that may be hard to otherwise access. These will be ones which work on google but most should work in other search engines as well
If put a word or phrase in "quotations" this will make any result require that specific string of characters shows up in your results. if its an important piece of information and you search is showing you other unrelated stuff constantly, or you're looking for an exact quote from an article or something, try adding quotation marks around that portion of your search.
add a - (minus/dash) before a word. This has to be directly next to the word like -this. Doing so removes the term from the search. You can combine it with the previous tip to remove entire phrases or strings from your results. sometimes its hard to find what you want because theres something more popular with a similar name. say you want to find something george h w bush wrote, but George W Bush keeps coming up, you can search
George Bush -"George W Bush"
and now it will take out any results that are about the other bush (or at least the ones which contain his name written that way). Its rare for this to be needed, usually you can just be more specific or use the first trick, but sometimes it can be helpful for finding very niche information when theres a lot of false positives.
theres also ways to search by date, where you add either "before:" or "after:" and then follow it immediately by a date written in YYYY-MM-DD format.
there are also several things you can do to search for images better. you can use reverse image search (images.google) to find if a picture already exists elsewhere, or try to find the source of it, and you can also search images by color weirdly enough, though I've not found it useful personally.
Thats most of the search engine specific tips. You can probably find more if you look them up. They're niche, but good to know exist, because when you need them you really need them. Lastly, often phrasing can matter. dont be afraid to switch up word order or append a website name like nytimes, al jazeera, or reddit to the end of your search for more specificity depending on what you're trying to find, it can help a lot, you don't need a plainly worded coherent sentence for the engine to work, often being too grammatically correct will make results worse.
Now onto site navigation and shortcuts. One of the most important things for research is finding sources for claims. Often websites will link their sources with either outgoing hyperlinks or little numbers above words that will take you to a later portion in the page. Using these is crucial for doing critical research, but they can often make it easy to lose your spot in the webpage. to prevent this, you can either click your scroll wheel inwards (called middle click), or hold the ctrl key while you click. These will both open the link you're hovering in a new tab, allowing you to return to the one you're on without having your place moved at all. If you middle click without hovering a link, it will put you into scroll mode, and dragging your mouse up or down will continually scroll the page in that direction.
If you want to make an new blank tab quickly, you can use ctrl+t, if you want to reopen a tab you closed before, even on accident, you can use ctrl+shift+t, which will open the last tab you closed, and you can do it repeatedly until you open many many tabs. I use this shortcut a ton to find things I would've otherwise lost. Another thing thats really useful for finding things within webpages, is ctrl+f, which lets you search the entire page (or as much is loaded) for certain words. it'll pop up a little text box and you can use it to find quotes or information without having to scroll through meticulously. It does look for exact matches though, so sometimes you have to be careful that the phrase you're looking for doesn't contain any unusual punctuation, or if it does that you're replicating it.
tab by itself typically runs between buttons on computers or pages, while space bar will scroll down automatically, shift+space scrolls back up. shift often works as an inverter for other commands, making them move in the opposite direction, it works for shift+tab as well, to move backwards to the last button. using alt+left arrow key, or alt+right arrow key, will move you back and forward respectively in a tabs history. if you want to quickly go back a page, you can do so via the arrow keys.
the last really useful shortcut I can recommend, if you have multiple windows open, maybe different browsers or you're talking to someone on your computer while also doing research, you can use alt+tab to quickly switch between windows (shift+alt+tab to go backwards). its not really research specific but its an invaluable tool for easily getting around on a computer.
Unfortunately these shortcuts are mostly only things you can do on desktop browsers, not mobile, but there are some things you can still do, like "find in page" is the same as ctrl+f and you can tap and hold a link to bring up the option to open it in a new page. Mobile is often harder to navigate, but its still very doable.
Those are most of the technical tips I have, but theres a lot of other things to learn for navigating the internet. the main thing i would stress is to look for primary sources. Often you may want to click a random garbage article and scroll until you see a hyperlink for a source, and scroll click that to read in a new page. Sometimes you'll end up at the bottom of a wikipedia page scouring their sources. even if the page itself is likely to be very biased, you can get an idea of popular claims and interrogate the sourcing they use. If you're looking up political information, I encourage you to search for how certain groups are funded, its often quite revealing once you get past the several layers of intentional obfuscations many think tanks and NGOs hide their donors behind.
If you're trying to find scientific information, you can use google scholar to find published and peer reviewed articles, and you can use sci-hub or other similar sites to access those papers for free. speaking of, you'll often encounter paywalls when looking into things, and while I'm not going to give specifics here as it often changes with time and this post is already long enough, theres nearly always a way around it if you do a little searching or reading on the topic.
Lastly, the internet archive is extremely helpful. Not only do they archive many primary sources, so you can look at them yourself and read old textbooks that would otherwise be lost, among other things, they also have the wayback machine which allows you to look at webpages in their previous forms. This can be super helpful if a webpage gets deleted, an article goes down, or even just to view a changelog of someones website. Often tracking this information of what was added to a site and when can be extremely helpful for internet archeology or just generally understanding a course of events. Even if you don't have anything useful in mind, go try the wayback machine on a random page that comes to mind. it has archives of most popular pages, and it will add pages you want if you need to access them later but worry they'll be deleted. Like a trans womans tumblr post for example lol.
anyway, thanks for the ask! hopefully some of this was helpful. I know its not the typical information people give when asking about literacy, but its my area of knowledge and I think its nearly as important as being able to read information itself. You cant read something if you cant access it. I'll happily let others discuss how to critically read and understand writings. Overall my main encouragement would be to just look stuff up, a lot. when it doubt, look it up. scroll a few sites. read some threads. find a youtube video. read an archive. open a million tabs, who's going to stop you, jeff bezos? learn what you can. As you learn more you'll get better at learning and knowing how to learn, and where to look for the information you need. Good luck!
