Post Truth

            Hello, everyone. This blog is response from Dilip Barad Sir's activity.In this blog i will discuss about post truth.

Post truth meaning 

            According to Cambridge dictionary post truth means"relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts"

Introduction 

          Post-truth is a term that refers to the 21st century widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that explain the historically specific causes and the effects of the phenomenon.

           While the term was used academically and publicly before 2016 (post-truth politics),Oxford Dictionaries popularly defined it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." The term was named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016, after the term's proliferation in the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Oxford dictionaries further note that post-truth was often used as an adjective to signal a distinctive kind of politics – post-truth politics.

        Some scholars argue that post-truth has similarities with past moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and dishonesty in politics,[9] while others insist that post-truth is specifically concerned with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices. Some influential philosophers are sceptical of the division between facts and values. They argue that scientific facts are socially produced through relations of power. The French philosopher Bruno Latour has been criticised for contributing to the intellectual foundations for post-truth. In 2018, the New York Times ran a profile on Bruno Latour and post-truth politics. According to the article, "In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were 'networked'; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible."However, the article claims that it is a misinterpretation to claim that Latour doesn't believe in reality or that truth is relative: "Had they been among our circus that day, Latour's critics might have felt that there was something odd about the scene – the old adversary of science worshipers kneeling before the altar of science. But what they would have missed – what they have always missed – was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known." In this sense, Latour (or Michel Foucault as well) draws attention to the institutional and practical contingencies for producing knowledge.

Example of post truth

          Even the more conventional array of lies produced by Trump are characterised by carelessness, shamelessness and numerousness. Many of his lies are misrepresentations of long-term processes in his own favour, false statements about media coverage, or lies about numbers – most recently about the number of victims of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. When lies become prevalent enough, the media and democratic audience easily become disoriented, losing the basic coordinates that usually support critical scrutiny.

Example in India 

Rahul Gandhi 

          From around 2012 onward, photoshopped images, memes, jokes were spread to create Rahul Gandhi’s ‘pappu’ image which consisted of calling him idiot, dumb, joker, comedian, half brained, under developed, man child who still watches cartoon network and hides behind his mother’s saree pallu. There were no facts in this narrative, only highly provocative triggers for the online masses to go ahead and lash out at a public figure with all the hate in the world. 

           The provocation often comes directly from BJP IT Cell head Twitter’s account containing ill-timed photographs or cleverly edited videos of Rahul Gandhi aimed at comic relief. These are then spread by other BJP leaders and influencers like pro-BJP journalists, bloggers etc. In Nov 2017, jokes went viral that Rahul Gandhi said he will install a machine to turn potatoes into gold. Rahul never said any such thing. But if you only watch a 20 seconds video clip edited out of the longer version of his speech, you would indeed see and hear him speaking in first person, “I would install such a machine that if you put potatoes from one side it would give you gold from the other.” He said it, but he didn’t say it, what’s the truth here? The truth is that for those 20 seconds Rahul was using sarcasm and mimicry to allege Mr. Modi of showing bizarre unrealistic dreams to potato farmers of turning their potatoes into gold. Who comes up with such sinister ideas of taking a 20 seconds of audio video clip out of context to suit a particular narrative, and why? And why do millions of social media users actually believe that he might have said it? Why does it stick on even after several media platforms busting the fake narrative?

Narendra Modi 

         In November 2016, Modi took to national television to announce that the country’s largest currency bills would no longer be in circulation, starting the very next day. The move, which was introduced ostensibly to clamp down on money laundering, eliminated 86% of India’s paper currency. Indians rushed to exchange their old notes, and in the days-long melee that ensued, wild rumours circulated online: that shops were set to hike the price of essential commodities, that new notes were imprinted with a “nano GPS-chip” that would enable the government to track down money launderers.  

Ram Setu

          An example of such statements that went viral in India was when the Science Channel, sponsored by Discovery Communications, released a two-and-a-half-minute video on December 11, 2017, on the Ram Setu, the shallow water coral formation in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of Rameswaram. Some sections of the media circulated this as fresh evidence posited by a group of “American scientists” to support the theory that a rock formation within the Palk Bay is actually the bridge that Lord Ram and his army built to reach Sri Lanka as described in the Ramayana.

       The political class lapped this up ignoring the fact that the video was only a promo for an upcoming series called ‘What on Earth’, which seeks to discuss the images of some attention-grabbing surficial structures as captured by satellites.