The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change
N
aomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.
These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered 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 BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.
She is already well known as the author of The Power, a feminist sci‑fi novel that won the 2017 Women’s prize for fiction, a games writer, and a science presenter for Radio 4. It is enjoyable to spend time with an author who reads widely, thinks deeply and possesses the intellectual confidence to take such a lofty, historical view of the messiness of our current political moment. Alderman gives us a lively introduction to work by theorists such as Walter Ong, who studied how literacy changes culture, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, who explored how the printing press transformed our relationship to the truth. Ong observed that oral cultures were more conservative and less exploratory than literate ones because learned people had to spend so much time memorising information. Writing made possible more complex, reflective thought.
