Author Elif Shafak on the power of storytelling | Tortoise ThinkIn

A Tortoise ThinkIn with James Harding, run as a newsroom conversation rather than an interview, so half the hour belongs to the room — a Cypriot whose family was split by the partition, a Turkish woman with a Greek grandmother from Istanbul, a man pressing her on whether “populism” is just what being unheard sounds like. The spine is a distinction she draws early between information, knowledge and wisdom. She recalls the techno-optimism of the early 2000s, when a young couple in Egypt named their child after Facebook, and says what went wrong is that “we relied too heavily on information”: scrolling “gives me the illusion that I know something about the subject,” and “we forgot to say I don’t know” — the point where Socrates began. Wisdom, in her account, is the stage that needs empathy, not more data. Asked whether social media also gave voice to people who had none, she concedes it at once, speaking as a woman from the Middle East, and then refuses to hand the subject over: “technology is too complicated… let’s leave it to people who know the subject. Let’s not do that.” AI is never named. The hour is here for its account of what a mind loses when it mistakes information for knowledge, from someone who writes out of the silences official archives keep.