Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies
How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age
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- 24,99 €
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- 24,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles?
Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives.
• Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information.
• Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive.
• Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us.
Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barclay, a deputy University Librarian at University of California, Merced, offers a slim guide on how to separate factual information from fake news. He offers basic methods for evaluating information, such as determining whether the source for a news story is identified, and whether a so-called expert has the relevant credentials to provide an informed opinion. There's also a quick introduction to logical fallacies, with short definitions of concepts like confirmation bias and moral equivalence. The best parts of the book deal directly with web-related topics. His chapter on fake news provides a clear and succinct overview of the not-so-new phenomenon and the factors that have contributed to its recent proliferation (e.g., information overload, search engine optimization, and political bots). And his evaluation (and endorsement) of Wikipedia as a viable of information source is spot-on. Toward the end, the book shifts to more advanced topics (statistical models, scholarly information) that will be less useful to lay readers. Though Barclay intends this work for "anyone who cares about the trustworthiness of the information they encounter," its scope will make it most useful as part of college coursework .
