The new dark age

We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though if I were, that too would seem irrefutable. I mean in a far broader sense – that the world has entered a new dark age.

The first dark age was characterised by a lack of information. For centuries almost nobody – even the most privileged people of the day – had access to any knowledge. The second dark age, by contrast, is characterised by a surfeit of information. Indeed there is so much information around us that nobody has a chance of absorbing even a calculable portion of it.

Never mind the millions of books published each year, or the billions of podcasts. Consider the trillions of opinions thrown out every day. The noise created by the half a billion people who use Twitter tends to dominate. But what about the almost three billion people (nearly half the planet) pinging messages to each other on WhatsApp? Today people have information coming at them all the time from every direction, and almost no ability to sift it.

Let me give one example that came my way this week. I hadn’t heard much of the Lancet since the Iraq war. That was when a magazine previously known only among those interested in peer-reviewed medical journals made huge headlines. For no clear reason, the journal decided to publish an article far away from its area of competency. The piece attempted to put a number on civilian deaths in Iraq. Its methodology was shown to be badly flawed, but the figure it came up with got thrown around anyway.

Personally, I chalked it up as one of those occasions when a publication completely delegitimises itself.