> What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway.

No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.

Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.