13 books that influenced my book on social media, misinformation, journalism and political division
Can misinformation be eradicated?
I’m convinced the answer is no. And I’m not alone.
I interacted on Twitter this week with Wired’s Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, about this very issue. His tweet thread is worth diving into.
Martínez is one of the leading journalists on the misinformation age.
After spending a year researching and writing my own recent book, After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump, I came to the same conclusion. Our toxic mix of fake news, cultural division and political polarization is here to stay.
And it’s not necessarily because of one side or the other. Sides change. But human nature doesn’t. It’s human nature to evade or skew the truth. And now we have the digital tools — Facebook, Google and others — that make it easier than ever to isolate ourselves, confirm our biases and propagate misinformation.
“I think the problem,” Wellesley College computer scientist Panagiotis Takis Metaxas told me, “is really the human race.”
My goal with After the Fact was to deliver a thoughtful, well-reported nonpartisan analysis of the crisis that we face. And while I’m happy with the book’s sales, it’s not a bestseller — and I’m not surprised.
Indeed, the fact that it’s not a bestseller actually proves a core point of the book: that extremism sells in our chaotic digital universe. Thoughtfulness rarely prevails. It’s hard to stick out when you’re not siding aggressively with one side or the other.
How many times have you seen a truly thoughtful Facebook post command attention on the News Feed? It’s rare. But hot takes flow into the News Feed because they generate engagement.
Some people still quibble with the concept of a “post-truth” or “post-fact” society. (Then they won’t like the title to the introduction of my book: “The Post-Fact Era.”) I would argue that truth still exists, but it’s increasingly irrelevant to many of us. And that makes us more susceptible to manipulation by motivated actors.
But we don’t need to accept this new paradigm — at least not on an individual level. The pursuit of truth requires devotion to curiosity and a willingness to accept that we could be wrong. It requires us to meet people who aren’t like us. These are not popular qualities in our culture.
Luckily, there are others out there shedding light on our related crises of ideological segregation, cultural division, sensationalism, extremism, incivility, apathy and misinformation.
Below are some books that influenced my thinking as I was writing After the Fact. I certainly didn’t agree with everything in these books. But that’s a good thing.
As the holiday shopping season approaches, let’s support authors and journalists who are pursuing the truth. It’s one tangible thing we can do to. Consider adding one or more of these books to your wish list:
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Tom Nichols
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality by Chris C. Mooney
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna Freitas
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger
#republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle
The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch
And here are three books I’ve read since my book was released that also make excellent contributions to understanding these issues.
Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News by Bob Schieffer (with H. Andrew Schwartz)
Polarized: The Collapse of Truth, Civility, and Community in Divided Times by Paris N. Donehoo and Keith M. Parsons
Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg
