麻豆传媒

Where鈥檚 Bert? The muppet became an accidental ally of bin Laden (Image: Reuters)

Two new books explore how the internet is changing us and our world 鈥� but it鈥檚 too soon to tell which of the changes really matter

WE LIVE in revolutionary times. Information moves around the world at the speed of light and is duplicated endlessly, available to anyone with a connection. 鈥淔or good and ill,鈥� writes Charles Seife in Virtual Unreality, 鈥渄igital information is now the most contagious thing on the planet.鈥�

But the history of information is the history of misinformation too. Seife, a journalism professor at New York University, takes us on an entertaining tour of the many ways we are lied to online. It used to take a totalitarian state to create an alternative reality, but anyone can do it now. According to one estimate, a third of online reviews are fake. And fake images often pop up on news sites and social media, and even win prizes.

聯It used to take a totalitarian state to create an alternative reality, but anyone can do it now聰

In practice, the democratic ideal of Wikipedia, in which we are all editors, is anarchy. As it becomes harder to sift fact from fiction, Seife observes that we 鈥渁re at the beginning of an information famine鈥�. But he provides anecdotes to snack on while our stomachs grumble.

Take Bert the Muppet. In 2001, he started keeping bad company. News reports showed protesters at anti-US rallies waving placards in which Bert鈥檚 scowling yellow face peered over Osama bin Laden鈥檚 shoulder. Had Bert been adopted as a mascot?

The truth was more mundane. A few years earlier, a joke 鈥淏ert is Evil鈥� website posted faked images of Bert hanging out with global nasties. The images spread so far that when a printshop created bin Laden posters, the images they found online included Bert.

And what of Amina Arraf, a Syrian-American activist blogging about life as a young, gay woman in Damascus? Following reports of her kidnap, 鈥淔ree Amina鈥� websites popped up everywhere. Except there was no Amina, just a US student at the University of Edinburgh, UK, called Tom MacMaster, who created Amina to give authority to his musings about Middle-Eastern politics.

Seife鈥檚 book highlights the problems caused by internet identity: who are we online? The person we say we are, or the person typing? And if all opinions are valid, who is an authority?

In The Fourth Revolution, Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and ethics at the University of Oxford, argues that online narratives change how we see ourselves. This is not bad per se; even offline, faking is part of life. What counts as 鈥済enuine鈥� 鈥搊ur 鈥渢rue鈥� selves, say 鈥� is already slippery. 鈥淲hat we consider natural is often the outcome of a merely less visible human manipulation,鈥� writes Floridi.

Online interaction just gives us more opportunity to pull the strings of a virtual puppet. But it is a complex arrangement. Who people think you are feeds back into who you think you are, which feeds into who we actually are.

For Floridi, we鈥檙e living through a fourth revolution. Copernicus cast us out from the centre of the universe, Darwin from a unique position in biology, and Freud from the perceived seat of privilege in our own self-deceiving minds. Now, we are being ousted from the centre of the 鈥渋nfosphere鈥�, says Floridi, as the machines mediating our conversations elbow us aside.

Floridi鈥檚 aim is to prepare the ground for 鈥渟erious philosophical digging鈥�. In so doing, he weaves Proust, Aristotle and Verdi into a discussion of Google+, WhatsApp and sexting 鈥� not always to the reader鈥檚 enlightenment. He also drops neologisms that are likely to blunt the philosophical shovels of those to come: for example, he uses 鈥渙nlife鈥� (online life) to refer to our new existence.

Fascinating stuff. But, ultimately, both books suffer from being five years too late and five years too early: we already know the internet is changing us, but we lack the perspective to say what shifts are the most important. And all the while, the wheels of change keep on turning.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩ebooting the real鈥�