The age of internet overload

When I was at university – a short career studying politics, because I was going to change the world – my subject choice gave me a certain freedom of information.

This was 1991, censorship was still rife, and the library and student bookshop had sections of banned material, but I, Ms Political Science, was allowed to study these for the sake of my education.

I tried, but they had ensured it was all so dense, so dull, so grey and impenetrable, that you could drown in the sea of it. I suspect I did and when I came up for air, I never went back.

However, little did I know that my most profound lesson about future politics was in that very experience, the feeling of being flooded, engulfed.

Welcome to 21st century politics, to the age of information where the facts are available to all, where censorship has been killed off by the democracy of the internet, where the truth will set you free … if you can find it.

Because this very deluge of information is being used against us; we are drowning.

Think I’m exaggerating? According to an article in the Observer, quoting a book by a dedicated scholar of the internet, Margaret Roberts, China has embraced this as policy.

Essentially, as tech writer John Naughton puts it, they swamp citizens with data, “some accurate, some phoney, some biased – with the aim of making people feel overwhelmed”.

Trump has mastered it; the Brexit campaign is all over it. Facts? Who needs facts? Say it loud enough and often enough, provide a tsunami of counterfacts, and we all drown alongside the truth.

Should you trot off to verify, to have a tribunal or an official investigation, and then return with the facts and figures, already the world has moved on.

I Google apartheid (which is not on the agenda any more): 20.4 million results. The next morning it’s exactly the same.

But when I type in Brexit? 78 million hits become 80 million overnight.

Donald Trump? 668 million, then 677 million overnight.

Chinese government? 1.1 billion, with 40 million added overnight.

It’s an insurmountable information overload.

Censorship is dead. Long live censorship.