Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm
W
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’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.
The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d 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’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.
It’s not a single moment; it’s an epoch – we’re in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I’d 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’t just neutral technological improvements; they change us psychologically and socially in profound ways that cannot be reversed.
