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.