Seems like a fun read! Dwight Garner’s review in the NYTimes:
Charles Seife is a pop historian who writes about mathematics and science, but his abiding theme, the topic that makes his heart leap like one of Jules Feiffer’s dancers in the springtime, is human credulity…
Mr. Seife’s new book, “Virtual Unreality,” is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones. The author is unusually qualified to write on this subject, and not merely because his surname is nearly an anagram for “selfie.”
A professor of journalism at New York University, Mr. Seife is a battle-scarred veteran of the new info wars. When Wired magazine wanted to investigate the ethical lapses of its contributor Jonah Lehrer, for example, it turned to Mr. Seife, whose report pinned Mr. Lehrer, wriggling, to the plagiarism specimen board.
Mr. Seife has also been targeted, unsuccessfully, by the conservative sting artist James O’Keefe. “O’Keefe and Lehrer”: the title of hell’s own news hour…
Mr. Seife worries about how easily fringe ideas find purchase on the Internet, where previously they’d have perished from lack of oxygen. He writes about how the South African government was persuaded by H.I.V.-denialist websites to forgo providing essential antiretroviral drugs to those who were sick. He writes: “Three hundred thousand deaths might be the most extreme consequence of a Google search gone wrong.” …
Despite his many dire warnings, Mr. Seife hasn’t given us a soggy litany of complaints. For one thing, he’s very often quite surreally funny. “Like the mythical oozlum bird,” he writes, “Wikipedia seems to have the ability to fly around in ever decreasing circles until it flies right up its own rectum.”
For another, he finds much more to like than dislike about the web. He puts his central concern this way: “Digital information gives power to the people, but it gives even more to those who prey upon us.” …
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Apart from remembering that on the Internet anybody you think you know might actually be a dog, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: ‘Virtual Unreality’Post + Comments (163)