Post-truth, what is it? And is it a new "age"?

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-38168792

So, from what I understand, post-truth is a rejection of MSM news and sources and instead emotions and gut instinct are believed instead. That and something about fake news...

So this threat is all about the "Post-truth age". Heck, is it an age? Is it a silly fabrication conjured by the media? Or is it a term only relevant to this year- to 2016?

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My take on post-truth is that it's a word MSM have put out there after been humiliated by Brexit and then with the US Presidential Election. I personally think the term "post-truth" should be renamed "post-MSM truth"; that people are turning to other news sources on the internet and to foreign news channels, in particular RT, all the while rejecting conventional MSM.

So perhaps "post-truth" is MSM coining a term for its own irrelevance? Though I think the term is quite silly because it seems to be implying that large sections of the population are following something other than THE (MSM) truth and thus must all be: stupid or biased or deluded.

Perhaps also there is another factor at play; TV is losing its efficacy when it comes to influencing people and their views. The fact is the internet is far more powerful and combines the best and worst of TV. So the internet will either cause TV to disappear or envelop TV as TV programs are broadcast on the internet too. So perhaps "post-truth" could be renamed "post-TV truth" or "post-TV"?

[metarvo 711]

Hoo boy, so "post-truth" is the new word of the week.

A clear example is that the US election polls (which were by and large horribly wrong) were seemingly being used to influence the populace, rather than it being the other way around as polls are supposed to work.  Obviously, that technique failed, and its failure merely reinforces that the former of these two scenarios is what actually happened.  Think about it; if the people truly had influenced the polls, then the said polls would have reflected the result that actually took place in the US.  They didn't.

You don't even need MSM sources decrying "fake news" pumping it out themselves to realize they're losing their relevance.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

In an age where emotional arguments, Tumblr SJWs, and Reddit MRAs are the norm, a sexual predator has been elected president, and few trust news sources or science (Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, Vaccination), I can certainly see where 'post-Truth' culture has wreaked havok.

  Edited January 1, 2017 by OcramsRzr  
NEWS not new

[jmsepe 2,039]

Is this even something new? I think this is just getting more attention because media has been made more available to everyone these days.

[matias93 7,535]

If you ask me, this is only the realization --of part of some liberal and centrist elites-- that politics isn't, and never has been a matter of objectivity or facts. Politics operates over discourses, opinions and subjectivity, we like it or not. Whenever someone tries to use objective proofs of something being true, in politics, it backfires, because their facts become controversial, and then divergent opinions can be legitimaly held about it, regardless of expertise, scientific consensus or common sense.

In short, ideas are truths (or lies), or are political, never both at the same time.

***

Oh, and by the way, just to ease the rest of the forum to participate, please avoid so much abbreviations. I had to look on google just to grasp the full content of your posts.

[metasmurf 705]

With the breakdown of the old media landscape where newspapers are earning less money and journalists are being laid off we're heading into uncharted territory. If I look at newspapers in my own country and abroad I feel that fundamental journalistic principles are more and more becoming neglected. This includes accuracy, independence and fairness. Obviously you have alternative media, and while some of it is good proper journalism there are lots of opportunists and foil hat's spreading disinformation as well.

This is however not just a matter about media, in fact it's a much broader issue. Take science where research to a growing degree is being funded by corporations. It's the same thing there: fundamental scientific principles are being neglected. This can result in for an example medicine coming out on the market which is dangerous, but where side effects have been toned down or gone unmentioned in the bought research. There are numerous instances where this has already happened.

What might happen is that we'll simply run out of reliable sources of information in a sea of disinformation where everyone has to rely on their own ability of critical thinking what to make out of it. In a lot of way's, we're already there.

 

 

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

I think the term "post-truth" implies we once lived in an era of truth which just isn't... true. Deception, distortion, and propaganda have always been part of media, and I don't just mean News Media, I mean media dating back further than the Bible which itself is a document of "fake news" (in some respects). Now citizens have much better resources to inform themselves which upsets certain power structures. What those who complain about "fake news" lament most is loss of control of the narrative or their ability to manage public perception. The authority of news media once came from the prestige of the source, now what matters most is the quality of the content and how it holds up to scrutiny when compared to other sources or opinions.

 

[matias93 7,535]

Once again, what are we talking about is a fundamentally Anglo-Protestant phenomenon: 

"Trump perceived, correctly in my view, that political rhetoric in the United States had become empty, a vast collection of platitudes and bogus phrases that no longer bore any real connection to the truth. Everyone else pretended to mean what they said when they didn’t; Trump simply dropped the pretense. The result is a post-Christian political discourse of a distinctively American sort: blunt and self-assured and largely free of the obligation to express yourself with sincerity. The new post-Christian discourse uses words, not as vehicles to express thoughts and arguments, but as weapons — as instruments to wrong-foot adversaries and keep them guessing while you seize the advantage."

—Barton Swaim on The Washington Post

[Duke87 1,070]

On 1/1/2017 at 0:26 AM, jmsepe said:

Is this even something new?

Nope. People have long believed random nonsense they hear without fact checking it, except now it's "fake news" rather than "old wives tales".

The media deliberately sensationalizing things and printing unsubstantiated assumptions as fact is nothing new, either. Remember the Maine?

[Fantozzi 4,067]

You have to see that post-truth is a media centered term that suddenly looses its meaning if you sit in your dentist chair and he tells you: "this won't hurt".

Often paraphrased as 'so-felt-truth'. But if you feel it, the drill of your dentist in your teeth  - there is no 'so-felt-truth'. This is truth.

This term can only exist because people lost any sense for the immediacy of life. Because they are in holidays, take pictures of the beach and watch this pictures of their holidays meanwhile they are on holiday and talk about the pictures of their holidays as if those where the real holidays - the 'post-truth holidays', the holidays they felt they were them. They live their lifes through media - its like two parallel rail tracks running through time, one they see through a lens and this is the real one because they sit one the fake one.

That's why this term can exist. It is based on a 'if I felt pain' and a substitution of this 'if' with the sudden feeling of pain. The real life seen through a camera lense and this 'seen through life' is the only one they know. And for the reasl pain there are drugs to surpress it. And there are many forms of this surpression of real life, mostly it can only be felt if it comes through media. We could talk about sex now. And how people need a camera to spice their sex life. Better not.

Instead people feel hurting where no immediacy hurting is - they construct it. They make a stage of it to make their boring lifes more intens. And that's all abotut post-truth. It's something for the camera, the TV, the smartphone. Post-truth happens there.

When two teenager girls talk to each others -

"Oh, the shirt was sold out ... this hurts me so much much."

"Oh yes, I can imagine your pain."

There is where post-truth pain is created - in media.

Go out in the wilderness. You soon find out - the word 'post-truth' has absolutely no meaning there. It totally depends on a life created by you by using media.

Or just imagine some tells you he had a 'post-truth' car accident. Where it could have happened? The only place a post truth thing can happen is media or imagination. Real life will ignore every 'post-trruth'.

My 'post-truth' is: I have no cancer - this my felt truth.

What do you think? Will life respect this, my post-truth?

 

[madhatter106 3,911]

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

[Nevermore2797 112]

The five stages of a false narrative:

1.) Yellow Journalism

2.) Clickbait

3.) Fake News

4.) (Black) Propaganda

5.) False Flag

 

These kind of narratives have existed back then. Yellow Journalism is something sensational and exaggerated. This was mostly used by journalists back then. Then, they earned money. Nowadays, I can see this EVERYWHERE. One action, AN EXAGGERATED TITLE here. I can say that Pewdiepie can be a victim of this because of his "jokes." The reason is because of the Wall Street Journal. It was then followed by other media outlets calling him pretty much everything. Racist, Nazi, etc.

 

Jesus, these kinds of narrative make me believe the Operation: Mockingbird still exist up to now.

 

I am also getting a gut feeling that these people who censor other people for just telling the truth, and what is real have this kind of this thing in their mind. It's like you're with them or against them. If you are like them, you have no worries, but if you are on the other team or neutral, they will start attacking them regardless of alignment that is not them.

[Fantozzi 4,067]

3 hours ago, Nevermore2797 said:

This was mostly used by journalists back then. Then, they earned money. Nowadays, I can see this EVERYWHERE. One action, AN EXAGGERATED TITLE here.

One has to consider media as a part of entertainment industry not as a substitution for your own experience - and every journalist is free of a self-conception saying: "I want to entertain you" or "I want to educate you" (mostly it's a mixture of both - that's why journalism never can substitute real life experience or you'll begin to judge life like some kind of entertainment).

This can create a paradox as Paul Watzlawick descibed it in many of his books and can become morbid:

If a journalist is serious you accuse him not being entertaining, if a journalist is entertaining accuse him he isn't serious. Try it - this will work on every occasion.

So - if you want to, journalists can never do their jobs right. It's an impossibility you've created.

But the economic law is: to sell what you've got to say you'll have to be entertaining. 

So one could say, the sentence "All the world's a stage" - marks already what's called with a buzzword 'post truth'. And it's funny that this sentence was written by Shakespeare in a drama called "As you like it."

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Well, Russia outputted massive amounts of untrue propaganda in the midwest, an unprecedented level of it. The scale and ubiquity of misinformation now is what has created the Post-Truth Age. Fake News and government propaganda around the world outweigh actual factual news for the first time in modern history.