Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.

She is already well known as the author of The Power, a feminist sci‑fi novel that won the 2017 Women’s prize for fiction, a games writer, and a science presenter for Radio 4. It is enjoyable to spend time with an author who reads widely, thinks deeply and possesses the intellectual confidence to take such a lofty, historical view of the messiness of our current political moment. Alderman gives us a lively introduction to work by theorists such as Walter Ong, who studied how literacy changes culture, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, who explored how the printing press transformed our relationship to the truth. Ong observed that oral cultures were more conservative and less exploratory than literate ones because learned people had to spend so much time memorising information. Writing made possible more complex, reflective thought.

Similarly, the internet is changing us in profound ways. It makes it easier to think as a group, it has vastly increased the amount of information we each encounter and altered who can publish and broadcast it. It leads to “disintermediation”, because people can do for themselves things they once relied on specialists for – book flights, research vaccines. It has undermined the print-era institutions that once acted as gatekeepers to the truth. Eventually, Alderman writes, we’ll develop new institutions that will help us manage the firehose of information we’re now exposed to. For the time being, she argues, we would do well to shore up some old ones: broadcasters such as the BBC and public libraries.

Alderman has a keen eye for the many subtle ways that digital media is changing us psychologically, and she is wise to note the fact that these shifts are often double-edged. The anonymity and vastness of the internet mean more people are sharing their inner thoughts and feelings online, which in turn means more people are learning that the weird quirk they thought was totally unique to them – the pleasurable tingle of ASMR, say – is something they have in common with others. It has never been easier to understand that “there isn’t a kind of person who isn’t a person”, Alderman writes and yet, online, it’s all too easy to forget that the person you’re arguing with is real and has feelings.

With each new technology things get faster, she observes: printing a book is faster than copying one by hand; posting something online is quicker than printing it. Internet culture is evolving at an astonishing pace, and Alderman doesn’t even go into the disruptions of AI. We can’t possibly know how all of this will unfold, but it’s hard not to feel swept up by the sense of hope that underlies her speculations about our collective future. “We made a wonderful, catastrophic thing with writing. With printing. With the internet … We are making our minds do something they never evolved to do,” she writes. “It’s hard, and painful, and often makes us angry and afraid. And yet … every time we end by seeing each other more clearly.”

• Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (And Other Lessons from History About Living Through an Information Crisis) by Naomi Alderman is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.