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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Lockdown by Simon Armitage

 Lockdown: A poem about coronavirus outbreak

Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the world, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”.

“And I couldn’t escape the waking dream

of infected fleas”

The Great Plague of London, 1665

The first half of the poem deals with the dream of the poet which describes the condition of Eyam, Derbyshire village which was suffered a lot because of the pandemic Great Plague of London in the year 1665. At that time villages were separated by the boundary stone. Which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. The stone also touches the story of a doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming.

 But slept again,

and dreamt this time

Of the exiled yaksha sending word

to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

The second half of the poem is influenced by a scene from a Sanskrit poem Meghaduta by Kalidas. In which an exiled Yaksha convinced a cloud to take the message to his lost wife.

The seat of his exile is the mountain Ramgiri, and upon the poem, he is supposed to have passed a period of eight months in solitary seclusion. The poem opens at the commencement of the rainy season when heavy clouds are gathering in the south, and proceeding in a northerly course, or the resident of the Yaksha. To one of these, the demigod addresses himself and desires the cloud to waft his sorrows to a beloved and regretted wife. For this purpose he first describes the route which the messenger is to pursue; and this gives the Poet and opportunity of alluding to the principal mountains, rivers, temples and many other amazing landscapes and scenery he is going to pass across. Those are to be met with on the road from Ramgiri to Ujjain, and thence nearly due north, to the Himalaya or snowy mountains. The fabulous mountain and the city  Alka, which are supposed to be in the central part of the snowy range are next described and we then come to the personal description of the Yaksha's wife. The Cloud is next instructed on how to express the feelings and situation of the exile and he is then dismissed from the presence of the Deity, and the Poem of Kalidas.