Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility; New York Times, 7/1/14

[Book Review of Charles Seife's VIRTUAL UNREALITY: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True?] Dwight Garner, New York Times; Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility:

"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...

In “Virtual Unreality,” Mr. Seife delivers a short but striding tour of the many ways in which digital information is, as he puts it in a relatively rare moment of rhetorical overkill, “the most virulent, most contagious pathogen that humanity has ever encountered.”...

One of Mr. Seife’s bedrock themes is the Internet’s dismissal, for good and ill, of the concept of authority. On Wikipedia, your Uncle Iggy can edit the page on black holes as easily as Stephen Hawking can. Serious reporting, another form of authority, is withering because it’s so easy to cut and paste facts from other writers, or simply to provide commentary, and then game search engine results so that readers find your material first."