Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today by Naomi Alderman – How to Deal with an Information Crisis | History books

nOne of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you live in, says Amy Alderman, and she suggests one for ours: the information crisis. In fact, the emergence of digital media represents the third information crisis that humans have experienced: the first came after the invention of writing; The second follows the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly changed our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BCE, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets, and Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it’s too early to know where the Internet age will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project,” Alderman points out that those past crises offer clues.

She is already well known as the author of Power, a feminist science fiction novel that won the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction, a games writer, and a science presenter for Radio 4. It’s a joy to spend time with an author who reads widely, thinks deeply, and has the intellectual confidence to take such a noble historical view of the chaos of our current political moment. Alderman gives us a lively introduction to the work of theorists such as Walter Ong, who studied how reading and writing changed culture, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, who explored how the printing press transformed our relationship with truth. Ong noted that oral cultures were more reserved and less explored than literate cultures, because literate people had to spend a lot of time memorizing information. Writing has allowed for more complex and reflective thinking.

Likewise, the Internet changes us in profound ways. It makes it easier to think as a group, and has dramatically increased the amount of information we both encounter and can disseminate and broadcast. It leads to “disintermediation,” because people can do themselves things they once relied on specialists — book flights, research vaccines. It undermined the institutions of the printing age that had once served as gatekeepers to truth. Eventually, Alderman writes, we will develop new institutions that will help us manage the information firehose to which we are now exposed. She believes that at present we would be better off supporting some of the older channels: broadcasters like the BBC and public libraries.

Alderman has a keen eye for the many subtle ways in which digital media change us psychologically, and she is wise to note the fact that these transformations are often double-edged. The anonymity and reach of the Internet means that more people are sharing their inner thoughts and feelings online, which in turn means that more people are learning that a strange quality they thought was completely unique to them — say, the pleasurable tingling of ASMR — is something they have in common with others. It’s never been easier to understand that “there is no kind of person that is not a person,” Alderman wrote, and yet, online, it’s so easy to forget that the person you’re arguing with is a real person and has feelings.

With every new technology, things get faster, she notes: printing a book is faster than copying a book by hand; It’s faster to publish something online than to print it. Internet culture is evolving at an astonishing pace, and Alderman doesn’t even touch on the disruptions of artificial intelligence. We can’t know how all this will unfold, but it’s hard not to feel like we can’t possibly know the sense of hope that lies behind her speculations about our collective future. “We have done something wonderful and disastrous with writing. With print. With the Internet…we are making our minds do something they never evolved to do,” she writes. “It’s difficult and painful, and it often makes us angry and afraid. And yet… each time we end up seeing each other more clearly.”