Charles Seife

The award-winning author of Proofiness and Zero explains how to separate fact from misinformation online, covering a wide range of interests from breaking news stories and online dating to program trading and Wikipedia.

Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?

Virtual Unreality

Lindy

I'm rating this book three stars, but I wouldn't recommend it to any of my friends. 

Seife writes engagingly and the text is well researched. A few passages toe the fear mongering line, but the reason I won't recommend Virtual Unreality is that of all the incidents discussed in the book, I have participated in or watched almost all of them unfold in detail and in real time. Seife's analyses and insights are generic, so I didn't learn anything, and the personal solutions Seife offers seem even more common sense-- there are a few pages walking you through how to google someone (really). Therefore, I think the demographics best suited to this book are my grandfather who got his first email address last year and high school freshmen. 

Anyway, as I've been saying for years, all internet drama is about authenticity.

Virtual Unreality Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?

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