Sunday Reading: Post-truth

The Concept of Post-Truth

 This blog is a response to the Sunday reading task that we have been given by our professor Dilip Barad, sir. To understand the concept of the post-truth era. As we are now living in a world where feelings and emotions matter more than the truth. 

The word ‘post-truth era’ was chosen as the word of the year in 2016 by Oxford Dictionary. 

Definition: 

Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.  

"A post-truth situation is one in which people are less influenced by factual information than by their emotions or by beliefs they already hold."

"Of or relating to a culture in which appeals to the emotions tend to prevail over facts and logical arguments,"

(Collins Dictionary)

Why was this chosen? 

The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics. 

The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post- that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event – as in post-war or post-match – the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant. This nuance seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, in formations such as post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971).

Why is it that right now, when it is really easy to get access to facts, and information where you could just pull up your phone and look up anything in the world? Why is it now that we have the most access to facts, do facts mean the least? Why does fake news spread now? Why are we more polarized now than ever before and. Maybe we are naive about the internet, but the thing about having an international communication system whereby anyone anywhere can share anything and anyone anywhere regardless of saying their education background or their class standing can get access to real information through Wikipedia. As we think that the internet was going to make everyone happier and more informed more educated I and probably more tolerant of others around them, and the reason why I think that the internet should make people more tolerant is that it should expose people to people who are not like them.  

As Leo Tolstoy wrote, 

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

I think Facebook and other social media platforms should look at this now. they need to figure out a way not to elevate news but to let it languish and promote real news. They have a responsibility because they are curating the feeds of a billion people around the world, they have the responsibility to make sure those feeds are not misleading and that is something that they are bad at. 

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