People think before Brexit and Trump there was a pre-internet, golden age of information – what nonsense

We are all so very overwhelmed. At least on that we can agree, even if there’s very little else. And it all seems to be because there is simply so much information – so much to know, and so much to worry about never knowing, let alone all of the dis- and misinformation that we should be so vigilant to ensure we don’t get tricked into believing.

Those were the conclusions of an event last week – held by the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas, in partnership with The Independent – at which some of the university’s greatest minds, and this newspaper’s journalists, asked how we should deal with the vast amount of information that surrounds us. Dubbed “Independent Thinking In An Age Of Information Overload”, the event was an illuminating trip through all of the ways that the internet and the modern world inform and misinform us.

The panel was made up of some serious luminaries. Rae Langton, the eminent philosopher, told of the ways that information, thought, truth and more interweave and overlap. Social psychologist Sander van der Linden discussed the way that dis- and misinformation undermine the very fabric of society. Olivia Remes, who researches the ways that social media and technology are impacting (and mostly impairing) our mental health, showed just how much damage the information was doing to us.

From The Independent side came Mary Dejevsky, who has reported on the ways that information and misinformation are used in the political world, from Russia to the US. The event was hosted by Andy Martin, who sits right in the middle of the living Venn diagram that the panel represented, working at the university and regularly contributing to The Independent.

As the Indy’s technology editor, I was there to present a rather more optimistic case. Which in one way was easy: without the kind of readily available information that the panel was discussing, I wouldn’t have been there. (It’s up to them to decide whether that was a good thing.) I’m a journalist, who finds and organises information for a living; I write about technology, which is essentially the organisation of information. But I don’t think I’d have ever found my way into that role – or into Cambridge, where I was also a student, for that matter – were it not for the internet having made information so much more accessible.

As such, I was perhaps an inevitable choice to give the positive or utopian case for technology and for information: as some kind of counterweight against the heavy fears about what technology is doing to the world. And I am an optimist, I think, though a cautious and sometimes ambivalent one.

But I really did want to caution against something which I am certain about disliking: nostalgia. There was no paradise where we were once happy with what we knew and what we didn’t. There was no Eden in which we happily existed until someone ate from the tree of information and Satan spoiled it all – the devil coming not so much from the Apple tree as the Apple iPhone.

That sort of thinking leads us towards inaction, towards the belief that there is so much information – and so many huge companies messing with it – that there’s nothing we can do in response.

The oddity is that what makes us feel so powerless is the recognition that information isn’t just handed to us anymore from on high but is something we’re engaged in continually shaping and producing. Nowadays, your newspaper doesn’t just arrive on your doormat; you can comment on it, reply to it, heckle it – even abuse it, if you’re so minded, immediately and directly. Yet we have talked ourselves into believing that is something we should be afraid of; we’re overwhelmed by it.

And so we retreat: sometimes into literal retreats that offer the opportunity to switch off and take a “digital detox” for a weekend; sometimes into conspiracy theories that make everything seem predetermined; or into presidential and referendum campaigns that offer the promise that everything won’t be so overwhelming anymore. Faced with all this information that we’re at once powerless over and yet feel responsible for, is it any surprise that people have focused their energies on “building a wall” or “taking back control”?

What I wanted to argue is that we have walked ourselves into a set of mistakes in how we deal with a surfeit of information. We become overwhelmed by its scale; we trust people who say things are simple even if they’re not true; we accept the arguments of companies like Facebook and Twitter who suggest that all of this was inevitable, who claim that they had to pick one way of organising information and they surely can’t be blamed if something went wrong with that. But the Facebook news feed, like every other attempt to organise information, is a human process (mostly) and one that involves choices.

The information and the internet that distributes it could be another way. They already are, in the neatly organised and sometimes excessively careful world of Wikipedia. Even Google offers an alternative, having set itself the goal of collecting and organising the world’s information – including your personal information – and having mostly done an incredibly impressive job at it.

It shows I think that information is not some mysterious, autonomous power in the world, skulking around, undermining democracy and installing dictators. It’s a tool that people have wielded in various ways. We know who they are and we can ask them about it: Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and even Logan Paul are all people who have used the explosion of information technologies for their own ends. So are Stephen Hawking, Chelsea Manning and Jamal Khashoggi (and those responsible for the latter’s death). The information didn’t make those people villains or heroes; it just means we know who they are, and who we are. Perhaps information is bad for no other reason than that the world is a bad place.

The panel event discussed in this article took place during the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas on Friday 20 October