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

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

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.