John Keane, University of Sydney
This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futuresas a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.
It is also part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney.
This essay is much longer than most Conversation articles, so will take some time to read. Enjoy!
We live in an unfinished revolutionary age of communicative abundance. Networked digital machines and information flows are slowly but surely shaping practically every institution in which we live our daily lives.
For the first time in history, thanks to built-in cheap microprocessors, these algorithmic devices and information systems integrate texts, sounds and images in compact, easily storable, reproducible and portable digital form.
Communicative abundance enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, in chosen time, real or delayed, within global networks that are affordable and accessible to billions of people.
My book Democracy and Media Decadence probed the contours of this revolution. It showed why new information platforms, robust muckraking and cross-border publics are among the exciting social and political trends of our time. It proposed that the unfinished revolution is dogged by politically threatening contradictions and decadent counter-trends. The drift toward a world of “post-truth” politics is among these troubling trends.
What exactly is meant by the term post-truth? Paradoxically, post-truth is among the most-talked-about yet least-well-defined meme words of our time. Most observers in the English-speaking world cite the 2016 Word of the Year Oxford English Dictionaries entry: post-truth is the public burial of “objective facts” by an avalanche of media “appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
In China and in the Spanish-speaking world, respectively, commonplace talk of hòu zhēnxiāng and posverdad pushes in this direction. The popularity of the German postfaktisch (post-factual) usage captures much the same meaning. Selected as word of the year by the German language society Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS), it refers to the growing tendency of “political and social discussions” to be dominated by “emotions instead of facts”.
Not the claim to truth, but the expression of the ‘felt truth’ leads to success in the ‘post-factual age’.
Post-truth communication
A catchword that has gone viral so quickly surely deserves careful attention and crisper definition, especially if we are not to be thrown off balance by a global phenomenon that sets out to do precisely that.
We can say that “post-truth” is not simply the opposite of truth, however that is defined; it is more complicated. It is better described as an omnibus term, a word for comm