The Rise Of Truthiness

Ben Macintyre writes

In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.

This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?[...]

The plagiarism of words is a familiar crime, but the plagiarising of experience is something more subtle, and far harder to detect. “I never read a book before reviewing it,” declared Sidney Smith. “It prejudices a man so.” There is now an entire literary subculture devoted to the art of not-reading books, but pretending to have done so.