Do Not Believe All You See or Read!

Seife, Charles.  Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's
      True?  New York: Viking, 2014.  ISBN: 9780670026081.

 Based on his own experience as a journalist and a professor, Charles Seife provides a readable account of having to live with the Internet run amok.  He opens with an interesting warping of reality, the case of the Muppet Bert's affiliation with the terrorist Osama Bin Laden.  What had started as a joke with the  "Bert is Evil" website was transformed in to strange reality when someone made up posters using images off the Internet.  This segues into eleven chapters and three half chapters that covers a lot of ground regarding the effect the Internet has on your life (the half chapters provide a longer look at specifics covered in the previous chapter).  He then finishes with a Top Ten list for the Internet skeptic.

Seife provides plenty of material for information literacy discussions with his discussions of the interaction of information versus knowledge versus wisdom, the problem with authority (citing sources and proving sources), trolling, fake people, interconnection rather than communication, copyright issues, etc.  He also discusses the problems of too much information with noise drowning out signal, the dumbing down of intelligence, and the use of public/private information being used for private gain by companies and individuals.

Charles Seife packs a lot of information in a small book with the unfortunate result that it feels like a collection of essays rather than a coherent argument.  The coverage of multiple and divergent topics and some of the examples used will leave this book feeling dated in a few short years.  That being stated, the author has provided many coherent arguments that should be examined and discussed not just by librarians, information literacy specialists and academics, but by the public as a whole.