As a genetically formed skeptic I am gollywogged over what so many people believe so much of the time without so much as a passing ‘really?”  It seems, however, that the supply of credulity is matching the demand for patsies with every new Internet day. Here’s a possible antidote you might consider sending to all your Actual friends sometime this year: Virtual Unreality by Charles Seife

Mr. Seife’s new book, “Virtual Unreality,” is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones. …

…scam artists, photo manipulators, flash trading on the stock market, the promulgation of “bimbots” (fake online women created to lure lonely men) and the primordial idiocy of sites like Foursquare, which encourage you to tell people where you are in order to earn meaningless badges.

“People don’t think twice,” he writes, “about reflexively transmitting their whereabouts to a company that’s trying to bend your mind and make you a frequent visitor to your local Pizza Hut, Hess gas station, or RadioShack.”

He mentions a semi-satirical website called PleaseRobMe.com, set up by three computer scientists, “that used Foursquare and Twitter information to determine when a user was far away from his home” and thus “ripe for burglary.”

Review by Dwight Garner, NY Times and Scientific American