\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>e all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we\u2019re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.<\/p>\n The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success \u2013 it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you\u2019d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I\u2019m suggesting a name for the era we\u2019re living through: the Information Crisis.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a single moment; it\u2019s an epoch \u2013 we\u2019re in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I\u2019d argue that this is the third great information crisis human beings have gone through: following the invention of writing and the Gutenberg printing press, we are now witnessing a crisis caused by digital communications technology. These prolonged crises aren\u2019t just neutral technological improvements; they change us psychologically and socially in profound ways that cannot be\u00a0reversed.<\/p>\n <\/span>Naomi Alderman.<\/span> Photograph: Phil Fisk\/The Guardian<\/p>\n What we can see from the last two information crises is that they involve enormous leaps forward in knowledge and understanding, but also a period of intense instability. Following the invention of writing, the world was filled with new, beautiful ideas and new moralities. And there were also new ways to misunderstand each other: the possibility of misreading someone entered the world, as did the possibility of warfare motivated by different interpretations of texts. After the invention of the printing press came the Enlightenment, an explosion of new scientific knowledge and discovery. But before that period, Europe had plunged into the Reformation, which led to the destruction of statues and other artworks and many institutions that had been working at least adequately until then. And, to get to the heart of the matter, the Reformation in Europe meant a lot of people got burned at the stake, or killed in other terrible ways.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not just talking about literal \u201cburning at the stake\u201d, I\u2019m using it as a shorthand for the things people end up doing in the throes of a doctrinal dispute that are completely against the values they would otherwise claim to hold. They are things that involve turning a living, breathing person into a symbol, something that can be treated with extreme cruelty to make a point. When I talk about \u201cburning at the stake\u201d I don\u2019t mean criticising someone\u2019s views in mature debate or protesting against government policies. I mean the things that demean you as a human being if you do them to others. I mean the point when the desire to just win an argument turns you into someone who goes against all your other values. There is never a good enough reason to burn someone at the stake.<\/p>\n I think the following is incontestable: the only way to get rid of all opinions that are different from yours is by carrying out unthinkable human rights atrocities. (And this doesn\u2019t actually work: there are still, in fact, both Catholics and Protestants.)<\/p>\n We can already see how this type of thing becomes more common during an information crisis because we\u2019re now in another one. We\u2019re overloaded and overwhelmed by information. We don\u2019t have the social and informational structures in place yet to manage it. My suggestion is that this enormous information wave makes us anxious and angry.<\/p>\n How? All this information introduces us to all the things we don\u2019t know, all the ways in which we\u2019re not experts. We might end up expressing an idea online that we\u2019ve heard many times in our social circle only to be jumped on by 50 people who know more and tell us that our ideas are stupid, old-fashioned and even prejudiced. If this ever happens to you, it might make you feel profoundly unsettled, frightened, out of touch. That might be a good thing. It\u2019s also an emotionally destabilising thing. It works the other way around, too. When we can see everyone else\u2019s opinions, it turns out that someone we really liked may hold an idea that we find stupid, old-fashioned or even prejudiced. It\u2019s the \u201cI\u00a0used to like Uncle Bob until I saw his posts on Facebook\u201d syndrome. We\u2019re left wondering who we can trust and whether we\u2019re actually surrounded by upsetting idiots. All this can leave us feeling isolated and misunderstood, unsupported, frightened, worried and\u00a0angry.<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s probably very much how it felt in Reformation Europe to find out that your next-door neighbour had a very different idea from you about whether the bread and wine of the sacrament were really the body and blood of Christ.<\/p>\n Which is to say: sadly we can expect this to get worse before it gets better. But there are tools and techniques we can use in the current information crisis. There are ways we can be better equipped to deal with the era we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n <\/span> Illustration: Tim Alexander\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Just as after the print revolution in early modern Europe, it is now massively easier to access scientific information. In a few seconds I can find a video clearly explaining particle physics, chemical bonds or how vaccines work. And at the same time, it is also extremely easy to find very plausible-looking information that is completely false about how vaccines are actually terrible and suggesting solutions that I really don\u2019t even want to write down here.<\/p>\n But unlike people living through the print revolution, we have sophisticated and trusted information-dispersal networks that are still fairly robust. The BBC has a good fact-checking service. Snopes and PolitiFact are good. There are others, and it\u2019s worth getting familiar with them. Fact-checking is a specialised skill, though, and it is becoming more challenging as the fakes get ever more convincing.<\/p>\n Goodness knows, I have sometimes shared information on social media that turned out to be false. It\u2019s very embarrassing, and I feel the urge every time to double down on my mistake and claim that there is some way in which it sort of is true even though it\u2019s definitely not.<\/p>\n These days, I try to notice how something I want to share on social media is making me feel. If I have a very strong feeling of any type, I use that as a cue to slow down and check my facts. It could be a strong gleeful feeling of: \u201cOh, this is rich.\u201d Like a tweet I saw recently claiming to be by Donald Trump from a few years ago, saying that if the Dow drops 1,000 points in a day, the president should be impeached. \u201cOh, this is rich,\u201d I thought to myself. Of course, it\u2019s fake. Or if I feel \u201cOh God, that\u2019s dreadful, what those people are doing\u201d, that\u2019s also a good sign it might be fake. If it feels too perfectly tailored to me, if it presses my buttons, if it precisely tickles me where I like to be tickled or hurts me where I am vulnerable to being hurt, that\u2019s a sign to check the facts.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to need some new social norms to survive this crisis. Getting into the habit of pausing online whenever you feel a strong emotion and a desire to repost is one new norm to learn ourselves, and teach to children. Another is how to behave when you see someone sharing something you believe to be false. Don\u2019t embarrass them in public. It\u2019s going to happen to you one day, too. Think about how you\u2019d like that person to approach you. A private note, where you\u2019re on their side. It is extremely easy to alienate people via text communication because of all the oral-culture things that are missing from text. \u201cArgh, that made me laugh so much but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s true?\u201d Probably one of the ways that we get through this is by trying not to pointlessly alienate the other humans.<\/p>\n Institutions that are sources of basically truthful information are going to be particularly vulnerable when, inevitably, they do get something wrong. There is no such thing as an information system that never gets anything wrong. What we\u2019re looking for is a rapid acknowledgment of the problem, lack of defensiveness, curiosity about how it happened, a focus on systems and not individuals as the way to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen like that again. That\u2019s the ideal.<\/p>\n Even with the ideal system, in an information crisis there will be plenty of people willing to tear down a good-faith truth-seeking organisation over errors, who will use an error or a bad member of that organisation as evidence that nothing from that source can be trusted.<\/p>\n So, which institutions are we being tempted to condemn root-and-branch because of some mistakes and abuses? What large, trying-to-be-helpful-but-sometimes-failing associations would various rulers like to break up and destroy because they represent alternative sources of authority to their own narrative, and also there\u2019s money to be made?<\/p>\n <\/span> Illustration: Tim Alexander\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The internet allows every person to access precisely the opinions that most please or enrage them \u2013 being enraged is a particular form of being pleased, actually. Finding things on the internet to \u201chate read\u201d is a way of feeling great about yourself, because you\u2019re not as stupid and wrong as those other people. The internet allows and encourages us to either find opinions that we wildly, enthusiastically agree with or conversely the most ridiculous and objectionable and stupid forms of the views on the other side of any issue.<\/p>\n In every information crisis, there is a tendency to cut ourselves off and look not at the community around us but at the particular information that makes us feel comfortable and right. What we lose via giving in to that tendency is shared reality. That is, a reality we all consent to. Once you\u2019ve lost that, it\u2019s easy to dehumanise others, to start to believe that people who disagree with you aren\u2019t really people at all.<\/p>\n This is about not treating people as symbols. About the sense that we are not surrounded by cretinous, vicious imbeciles but mostly by careful, thoughtful people who may disagree with us but usually have good reasons for doing so and with whom we could have a reasonably civilised conversation and find many points on which we do agree. I know that saying this already makes me sound like a utopian. I know that it feels as if we probably are surrounded by cretinous, vicious imbeciles a lot of the time. That\u2019s because we\u2019re already right in the middle of an information crisis.<\/p>\n <\/span> Illustration: Tim Alexander\/The Guardian<\/p>\n If you agree that at least some of the reason that conversation and debate feel so fraught right now is because of our new communication technologies, maybe that helps with taking a step back, not immediately shouting angrily at someone who disagrees with you, online or in real life. Having thought about this a lot, I increasingly take everyone\u2019s emotions seriously, and treat very few people\u2019s opinions seriously. Everyone has an opinion. Unless the person is an expert it\u2019s a mistake to treat their opinion as very important.<\/p>\n A smartphone designed by people who care about your wellbeing wouldn\u2019t be asking you to log your mental health with it \u2013 don\u2019t do that, really really don\u2019t do that \u2013 or even give little passive-aggressive screentime notifications. A smartphone designed by people who care about your wellbeing would prompt you to choose apps to disable after a certain point in the evening, would ask to be turned off for a certain number of hours in the day. It would presume that in general your life is better if you are not spending all day looking at a device, and try to facilitate that. As smartphones don\u2019t do that, we need to treat them with caution. Or even get rid of them; a lot of people are doing that.<\/p>\n Likewise, in an ideal world, social media apps would make it extremely easy not to see content that you didn\u2019t want to see. It would be simple to \u201cwhitelist\u201d accounts, topics, video channels, types of content. That is to say, if social media apps were designed with public service in mind, it would be straightforward to tell them, for example, \u201cI only want to see my friends\u2019 pictures of their family, their pets, their recipes, their updates about their career\u201d or whatever it is that you want to see, without having to confront their political opinions. We are living through a time when we are going to be winding each other up a lot. It is all right to want to preserve relationships with family members and friends by only seeing their politics when you choose to engage with it.<\/p>\n And see people in person. If we rely on technology for human connection over in-person interactions, it will leave us feeling more lonely. If you\u2019re feeling more isolated than you were just a few years ago, technology might be the reason. Start by understanding that loneliness isn\u2019t just something that\u2019s happening to you because you\u2019ve done something wrong; it\u2019s a feature of the historical era we\u2019re living through. Make an arrangement to see someone, in person. Your friends would like to hear from you.<\/p>\n <\/span> Illustration: Tim Alexander\/The Guardian<\/p>\n There are some online services that allow whitelisting for the children\u2019s version but not for the grown-up one. This in itself is terrible for adults and for children. It creates a cliff-edge where either you\u2019re \u2013 let\u2019s say \u2013 under 13 and you can only see a few child-focused things on the internet, or suddenly you\u2019re 13 and you get the full firehose of internet horror straight in the face. It means childhood is more denuded of opportunities for entertainment and culture \u2013 if everything is accessed via a parent\u2019s smartphone then how do children play music for themselves, or browse radio stations? And it means that there are no helpful on-ramps where parents can slowly decide over the years which more adult-oriented content they can tell their child is ready for. \u201cProtecting the children\u201d is a terrible framing for this. We all need technology that at least allows us the option to take care of ourselves.<\/p>\n Although these problems would happen to some extent without technology companies, it is clear that many tech companies now are exacerbating them. We need laws that put us in charge of our own smartphones and our own social media, that mean that we can say exactly what we want to see on them and when. We deserve smartphones and social media that protect our wellbeing and that of our children \u2013 countries need to work together on new laws to force the tech companies to do this.<\/p>\n These days, on Bluesky, I have the words \u201cnot getting into pointless arguments on the internet is an act of revolution\u201d in my profile. It keeps me honest. Sometimes I feel tempted to get into a pointless argument. Sometimes someone else has to say, \u201cI thought you didn\u2019t believe in doing this\u201d. And I stand back and go, \u201cOh yes, arse, I haven\u2019t lived according to my own values here\u201d.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you\u2019re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols.<\/p>\n Ultimately, don\u2019t let the worst \u201cthe other side\u201d has done become the new low bar for your own behaviour. Don\u2019t treat people as symbols. Consider the possibility that where reasonable people disagree there may be some useful truth on both sides, even if it\u2019s only the truth of \u2013 as we say these days \u2013 \u201clived experience\u201d. Don\u2019t try to get anyone fired today. Don\u2019t insult or berate someone today. Don\u2019t trawl through someone\u2019s social media going back decades to dredge up the worst thing they\u2019ve ever said, today. Don\u2019t, fundamentally, burn anyone at the stake today.<\/p>\n <\/em>Don\u2019t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History About Living Through an Information Crisis) by Naomi\u00a0Alderman is published by Fig Tree (\u00a316.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we\u2019re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with. The Industrial Revolution, for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[15691,1001,187,1326,5543,666,12086,2640],"class_list":{"0":"post-33793","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-argue","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-crisis","11":"tag-dont","12":"tag-information","13":"tag-rules","14":"tag-strangers","15":"tag-survive"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1<\/strong> Find a fact-checker you trust<\/strong><\/h2>\n
2<\/strong> Notice how you feel before you\u00a0share\u00a0information<\/strong><\/h2>\n
3<\/strong> Resist the urge to shame others online<\/strong><\/h2>\n
4<\/strong> Give institutions the benefit of the doubt<\/strong><\/h2>\n
5<\/strong> Try not to \u2018hate read\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
6<\/strong> Recognise humanity<\/strong><\/h2>\n
7 <\/strong> Ignore the opinions of others<\/strong><\/h2>\n
8<\/strong> Use your smartphone judiciously<\/strong><\/h2>\n
10<\/strong> Don\u2019t cut children off altogether<\/strong><\/h2>\n
11<\/strong> Campaign for better laws<\/strong><\/h2>\n
12<\/strong> Avoid pointless arguments<\/strong><\/h2>\n