A slim volume, THE INTERNET OF US is unlikely to find a huge audience, as it is an academic (though readable) treatise, and nobody likes a naysayer. Despite his protestations to the contrary, author Michael Patrick Lynch believes that the internet holds many perils of which we are blissfully –-- willfully --- unaware. But instead of focusing on financial fraud and identity theft (though those are touched on), Lynch is more interested in how the typical surfer is being seduced by information rather than knowledge, and how this affects us in the long term.

An interesting, simple experiment that Lynch conducted involved posing four questions to himself (the first: What is the capital of Bulgaria) and then attempting to answer them without going online. “My little exercise brought home for me, made it personal, in a way that I hadn’t before appreciated…. It feels historic, something akin to what it might be like to dress up in period costume….” Later in the book, he builds on the dangers of relying on the web for our answers: “Google-knowing has become so fast, easy and productive that it tends to swamp the value of other ways of knowing like understanding. And that leads to our subtly devaluing these other ways of knowing without our even noticing that we are doing so --- which in turn can mean we lost motivation to know in these ways, to think that the data just speaks for itself.”

"[I]nstead of focusing on financial fraud and identity theft... Lynch is more interested in how the typical surfer is being seduced by information rather than knowledge, and how this affects us in the long term."

Quoting a range of intellectuals from Bertrand Russell (“growth in knowledge without a corresponding growth in wisdom is dangerous”) to Plato, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Lynch makes a good case for why we should approach our “google-knowing” warily. He believes that we confuse the information we receive, process and accept with objective truth. And because we tend to rely more on what comes from our definition of “trusted sources,” regardless of where they got their information, we are in danger of evolving into the self-referential --- in other words, “The Internet of Us.”

The problem with this cavalier approach to knowledge is that it threatens our democratic society. Lynch quotes Karl Popper’s 1946 warning that a world in which people don’t engage with others can over time become “a completely abstract or depersonalized society.” But instead of individuals being isolated, Lynch argues we are now grouped in “isolated tribes,” feeding our pre-existing beliefs and prejudices, but never getting beyond them. The obvious example of this is our current political system, with its parties hugging extremes and the populace blindly following favored politicians and pundits.

Lynch, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, has written several books, among them IN PRAISE OF REASON: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy. It is clear that his fervent hope is that we will use the internet with a more skeptical approach, as a tool rather than the source of our knowledge. We are moving into a science fiction realm where new technologies like Google Glass represents our “neuromedia” future --- we don’t need to go onto the internet, because it’s our new reality, surrounding us.