Sunday Reading:POST TRUTH

 The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year for 2016

🔘POST TRUTH 🔘

Hello Readers

This blog is a part of my 'Sunday Reading' assignment assigned by Prof.Dr.Dilip Barad Sir,Dean Fac ulty of Arts and Head of English Department of M.K.Bhavnagar University on Post-truth.. 

This blog is on my understanding of the word 'Post-truth'and my views on the word with appropriate examples.

💠Meaning of the word POST TRUTH:

🔶The Oxford dictionary defines the word 'Post-truth' as 

"Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts and are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

🔶The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word 'Post-truth' as

"Relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and belief ,rather than one based on facts."

💠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.

💠A brief history of post-truth

 

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).

 

 

A book, The Post-truth Era, by Ralph Keyes appeared in 2004, and in 2005 American comedian Stephen Colbert popularized an informal word relating to the same concept: truthiness, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’. Post-truth extends that notion from an isolated quality of particular assertions to a general characteristic of our age.

💠POST TRUTH & COVID 19 PANDEMIC:

It is widely agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic period has been characterized by confusion and a lack of understanding among the public and decision makers. What caused this?

One possibility is that uncertainty stemmed from a lack of knowledge: COVID-19 is a virus whose attributes were (and, to a great extent, still are) unknown. The lack of knowledge makes it difficult to answer questions concerning the spread of the virus, the duration of the crisis, and ways to cope with it. It is no surprise that periods characterized by a lack of knowledge are accompanied by charlatanism, misinformation, and errors, all of which are phenomena stemming not from the post-truth age but rather as a result from the need to fill the vacuum left by the only partial information available during the crisis.

💠COVID-19 and the Post-Truth Age: The Role of Facts in Public Policy | Summary of an Online International Conference

🔷Public Confidence

There is no consensus regarding the change in the relationship between the public and the decision makers and truth-clarifying institutions. On the one hand, the far-reaching policies adopted by many countries and the obedience by civilians to the limitations imposed upon them were indicative of public confidence in the knowledge relied upon by decision makers. The high media ratings were indicative of an element of public confidence in the media and the experts interviewed. On the other hand, there is no concrete information regarding public confidence during the pandemic period, and there may have been a decline in the faith in decision makers and truth-clarifying institutions, including the medical community, due to the multiple opinions and the frequent changes that revealed their lapses and weaknesses to the public. It is also possible that these two trends are occurring in parallel: increasing public confidence among certain populations and decreasing confidence among others, depending on whether the populations in question were directly injured by the virus and therefore intent upon clarifying the truth about it, as opposed to populations that suffered greater injury from the restrictions that were imposed by the government.

One of the insights emphasized at the conference is that public confidence is of great importance in times of crisis. First, public confidence may constitute a decisive factor in public compliance with imposed restrictions that may present ongoing challenges and be renewed in the event of a second wave of the pandemic. Second, lack of public confidence can be a weak point serving foreign elements with an interest in undermining popular confidence in institutions in democratic countries by highlighting the ostensibly preferable performance of totalitarian states during the crisis.

Click here To know more about the summary of this International conference.  

Here i am also sharing the video of this conference.

💠Post Truth by Lee McIntyre

How we arrived in a post-truth era, when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.

Are we living in a post-truth world, where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of “fake news,” from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into “information silos.”

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts.

McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

💠Humorous images about Post truth

💠Conclusion

To sum up we can say that post truth is a part of our learning and esteemed weapon of the politicians to win the heart of people or mass.I ia totally irrelevant from the contemporary scenario.

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