I glanced at this out of curiosity and before you know it, the book was simply reading itself. It is a subject that always intrigued me and I have found it incredibly interesting, alarming and scary as any horror novel - except this is not a fiction, but our reality.
James Ball is a British journalist and winner of Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, so he really has some solid background. His writing is exciting, inspired and straight to the point - in this book he elaborates about our virtual society that helped spread of all sorts of viruses that differ from other viruses in a sense that they spread trough our brains. He makes a good point that instead of bringing informations, the online world also spreads disinformation, fear, conspiracy theories and whatnot. To a big degree, it influences how people behave, what they think and worst of all, it can lead to serious crimes based simply on ideas, gossip or illusions. (Like father who kidnapped his kids and murdered them, to stop his wife from using them for satanic purposes)
Unfortunately, we all know people who succumb to conspiracy theories. I personally know some old school acquaintances who got lost in the rabbit holes and surprisingly, every now and than I find out that even people I know as my work colleagues (for example) have weird ideas picked up online. Because computer algorithm always brings you more and more of what you searched for, its quite dangerous to succumb to these temptations - before you know it, it might affect your whole perspective on life and reality. I found this book to be very informative, interesting and quite disturbing. We are still learning how to cope with this sudden explosion of technical progress and it is very possible that its effect on human brains are in fact very dangerous and perhaps even self-destructive.
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