The Internet has posed the biggest crisis in human communication since the printing press. Author: Naomi Alderman Said.
Author powera feminist science fiction novel from 2016said we are living through a “third information crisis,” in which digital communication is eroding face-to-face communication and perpetuating differences of opinion.
“When you have a person in front of you, you can have a conversation, and ideally through shared experiences and empathy, you might arrive at a new position where you acknowledge what each other brings to the conversation,” she said. “That never happens in a book or a TV show or a tweet or someone’s ranting YouTube video. I think that increasingly leads us into a kind of fundamentalism, of ‘I have my opinion and I’m going to stick to it.'”
Alderman is a new five-part documentary series for BBC Radio 4 exploring the impact of the internet on human communication. The Third Information CrisisIt starts tomorrow.
Over the course of five essays airing this week, Alderman argues that humanity has not experienced a crisis like this since the advent of the printing press, and before that, since societies moved from spoken to written language. These technological advances have “radically changed us psychologically, socially and emotionally in ways that are irreversible,” she argues in the series.
She will also cover misinformation, conspiracy theories, public disparity and groupthink. Alderman, who writes novels as well as video games, said she was drawn to the topic after witnessing the rise of “toxic rhetoric” over the past decade.
She said: “I was a woman working in the games industry during the Gamergate scandal in 2014. [an online campaign of harassment against women working in gaming]”I started to get bored of all the conversations that were being had about the culture wars, and I started to think, this conversation doesn’t work, this conversation isn’t going to change people’s minds, what is going on?”
While talking with historian Tom Holland about the Reformation, Alderman noticed a parallel: The invention of the printing press in the 15th century gave people access to information and the time they needed to spend on it in ways they hadn’t before, ultimately leading to the doctrinal disagreements instigated by Martin Luther. “When it comes to harmful arguments, there’s nothing more harmful than people burning each other at the stake,” she said.
“I saw the same pattern: When the amount of information available to us increases exponentially, we all become very anxious. We become very angry. People we thought we knew best have completely different instincts than we do about things that seem crystal clear to us,” she said.
“We don’t have a good way to deal with it emotionally.”
The latest novel, future, Seeing technology companies as an existential threat to humanity and believing that lessons can be learned from two previous information crises, the series asks: “How can we be good citizens in times of intense social and psychological upheaval?”
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She said: “When people say things like, ‘young people are less connected to each other than they used to be,’ that’s exactly what we’re feeling with the transition from word of mouth to literacy.”
“In the first information crisis after the invention of writing, important facts that had once been repeatedly passed on orally to disseminate information no longer needed to be communicated face-to-face, eliminating human contact and devaluing the local elders who were once the sources of wisdom.” Alderman
Alderman is interested in how to avoid Reformation-level violent confrontations amid the latest information crisis. “In any culture war, attacking people who believe the opposite is likely to have the most harmful effects,” she said.
Ultimately, she said, “I hope that the current culture war becomes more like a debate about the body and blood of Christ. It’s about understanding what we’re going through and figuring out how to not burn people at the stake.”
