Trust Me, I'm Lying

The author used to be a professional PR specialist and now he exposes many of the tricks he used to manipulate the medias, as well as those that were used against him and his clients.

The book focuses mostly on the internet and especially on blogging, making a very powerful argument about how the very nature of online information and social networking, obsessed as it is with pageviews, is making information dramatically sloppier. The bottom line is: nobody checks the facts anymore. Information just flows from one website to another, going viral and influencing the public opinion even when it's spreading untruths, and even when there's no real news. Anybody that has ever clicked on a sensational headline in Yahoo! News or The Huffington Post just to find out that the related article was five lines long and didn't really say anything substantial, will immediately recognize what Ryan Holiday is talking about.

The only critic I have for the book is that Holiday is perhaps too eager to believe that people are being mislead, made believe in narratives, rather that being fed the narratives they really want to believe in. He may have trust in his own, and everybody else's, powers of "manipulator" a little too much.

Regardless, the book is definately worth reading.

Here is my review in my Spanish Blog: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2012/10/trust-me-im-lying-confessions-of-media.html
The author of this book starts by giving an example on how, with the right manipulation, any information can become viral in internet and create a revenue of millions of dollars in advertisement fees. He explains the tricks he has used in what he claims to be his former life as a media manipulator, and he gives detailed and step by step instructions, even with examples of letters and lawsuit threats that he helped put together in the past.
After that, the author says that he feels awful about what he has done. He has made a lot of money, that is true, but he has destroyed so many lives and so many hones businesses just by spreading goship about them just to get the internet traffic, that he is really sorry and wants to make up to all the wrongdoing he has made by spreading the word and making us -the internet surfers- more aware on how we are being manipulated, and how what claims to be "information" is in reality "dis-information" because what newspapers and every news media do is to update their web pages with texts designed to attract attention, clicks and participation, and do not give a darn about keeping the public well informed.
The author says that he feels remorse, and that their readers could as well try to benefit from all those manipulation schemes, but in the end, if they succeed, they would only be miserable because they have helped the world to be an even worse place than that they found when they first arrived.