The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality [Hardcover]

Humanity has always craved, and feared, information. Alicia Wanless offers a fresh understanding of the relationship between people, technology and knowledge, today and throughout history.Depending on the news you read, new tools like AI will either save or destroy us. But our response to emerging technology's 'unprecedented' threats actually follows a pattern as old as civilisation. From ancient Athens to COVID-19, social media to spam, Alicia Wanless shows how humans have always consumed information, whether accurate or not.First a new technology changes how information is shared, broadening its availability and accelerating how fast it travels. Then, as more people engage with this new content, fresh ideas arise, often challenging prevailing beliefs. Some use the new tools to promote their views, win power or simply profit, adding to the mounting information pollution. Competition and conflict follow. We scramble--in vain--to control information flows and use of the new technology.With democracies worldwide lurching from crisis to crisis, knee-jerk reactions to information conflict won't suffice. What's needed is an understanding of our nature as 'information animals', in a millennia-long relationship with technology--and of how a content-saturated world impacts the political battle for hearts and minds.AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. What Can Ecology Teach Us about the Information Environment?2. For Your Information3. The Information Environment4. Pulling Threads Together: Ancient Greece5. Tyrannical Ties: Charles versus the Godly6. A Tale of Two Countries: American Civil War7. Alphabets and Aliens: Vietnamese Independence8. The Ukrainian Curse of Nonexistence9. All Hail Finland?10. The Future of the Information AnimalGlossary of TermsNotesIndexAlicia Wanless is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she runs the Information Environment Project. She completed her PhD in War Studies at King's College London, combining ecology and lsŒ