The internet is, like the printing press and papyrus before it, “a good thing”. Yet, it seems that this quantum leap in our ability to access information comes at a cost that we have yet to value fully. The reasons for this are interesting.

We in the West are only slowly beginning to grasp that our love of rationality and factual knowledge, and the remarkable comforts it seems to have brought, is happening at the expense of other equally vital aspects of our nature such as ethics, memory and common sense.

Thinkers from fields as diverse as art, politics, psychology and neuroscience are beginning to realise that all information – useful or otherwise – is processed and understood in an emotionally charged context. Human beings are inherently social creatures and so one of the most vital sources of emotional charge lies in the way we relate to other people. Emotions are, after all, social events.  The way in which our emotions modulate and even control the conclusions that we draw from furnished data are complex processes that we do not really understand.