Take a medium size cooking pot, half fill it with water, toss in a handful of politicians, add a pinch of titled ignorance and a generous sprinkle of irresponsible journalism. Add a stressed manager or two, a dash of uncertainty and a little religious fervor, and gently bring to the boil. In just a few minutes you will have a bubbling cauldron of panic. The last few months have witnessed excessive and erroneous hyperbole on Y2K and GM foods. More recently it was mobile phones cooking our brains, and 12 months ago we had Dolly the celebrity (cloning) sheep, and oral contraceptives. The list is endless, and the reporting mercilessly inaccurate and superficial, as the media makes every effort to perturb society with the distorted reporting.

Networked technology means we can now communicate faster, with more people in more locations, across the whole spectrum or interests down to individual groups. But unfortunately we are often fed information prematurely from dubious sources. And whilst every human has the right to freely voice their views, concerns and opinions, and have them represented, on any topic, who would consult an Amazonian witch doctor when their television needed repairing? So why do we have history graduates reporting on GM foods, English graduates delving into the dangers of cloning, or someone with no particular qualification worrying about mobile phones. And worse, we see supposed researchers making public reports on the basis of very flimsy evidence. No wonder almost every major issue is misrepresented, and no wonder we live in a society that hypes technofear. Developing the skills to interpret and rank the credibility of information looks like becoming a new and valuable growth industry.

In defence of a growing technofear culture, it is amazing that anyone in any company or government should imagine that they can contain and control information. Sooner or later, and generally sooner, all bits become free. A bit based world has to be one where bit access is a right. But along with that right comes a new responsibility - to get educated - to understand before actively entering a debate or setting off alarms. Judging by the present furore on GM foods you might have thought the end of the world was upon us (again). Curiously, the UK seems to be the only country seeing this as an issue - in the USA it is business as usual with a focus on cheaper and better quality food. In truth, the genie is out of the bag - everything has been genetically modified by nature and people over millennia.

I wonder how many people go to sleep at night worrying about their microwave oven? Here is a device mounted at head or torso height generating around 1000W of radio energy. Have you ever heard of anyone having the door seal checked? If a mobile phone with a maximum radiated energy of much less than 0.5W really has the potential (which I very much doubt) to cook our brains, imagine what a fraction of 1000W can do. Also, start to worry about our police and armed forces with radio units radiating 5W or more into the brain. (No smart letters and Email about the IQ of policemen and soldiers please). If you use a lap top computer perhaps you should also worry about the radio energy radiated directly into the tissue of your nether regions. And what about light bulbs?

I am not for one moment suggesting we should be complacent. But reference to decades of experience may be less destabilising than nonsensical debate and reporting. Cloning, genetic modification and exposure to radio energy have good safety records spanning 100 to 500M years. With limited research facilities and funding it might have expected our society to invest where we know there are definite problems. What a shame we hear relatively nothing about people killed on our roads, starving to death world-wide, or dying as a direct result of our massive consumption and burning of hydrocarbons.

There are a plethora of important things we need to address, but informed and intelligent debate is required, not panic. It is as if we have lost the ability to quantify and assess risk. Lying in the sun, visiting a tanning shop, living in a high granite area or under the fall-out zone of a coal fired power station most likely constitute risks of far greater magnitude than any mobile phone. Smoking, drinking alcohol, crossing the road, and contraceptive pills certainly present orders of magnitude more risk than BSE and meat on the bone.

In a sane world we would assemble facts and figures, and use the best computer models and graphics available to make the complex more easily understood. We would then be able to focus our limited resources on the important and dismiss the trivial.