By: Gretta Córdova A.
We see them walking the streets, talking to simple people in rural areas, receiving proposals from different social groups, greeting and listening with a lot of empathy, giving speeches and the images along with this story are repeated all over the world, with more or less elements, but the pattern is the same. Who am I referring to? I think it is easy to identify politicians in campaign and mention some of the work they do in territory, that is, through their constant tours.
Now, if we move their work to the 11th century, we must add several elements such as the multiplication of messages in social networks such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; in addition to instant messaging such as whatsapp, messenger, telegram, among others. One way to gain audience is to attract young people who, with their technological equipment and with just one click, have access to the whole world.
Traditional forms of journalism are losing weight in the face of these new channels of communication. The media have a special role to play, associated with the proliferation of digital media, because its audience grows every day and becomes a very rigorous jury that could make the difference between continuing in the communicative process or stopping in the same.
All this is related to two terms used in our environment. The first, officially was included in the Oxford Dictionary in 2016: “Post Truth” or Post Truth”, also declared word of the year due to the increase in its use in two global scenarios such as the British referendum on the European Union and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the United States.
For several book authors, communicators and journalists such as Matthew d'Ancona and James Balls, both British, creators of the books Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (2017) y Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (2017) , point out in their publications that the post-truth era has a before and an after, which was born in a very specific moment, in 2016 where as mentioned before, not only United Kingdom said yes to Brexit, Trump used the bad practices of the company Cambridge Analytica getting the virtual management of a huge database along with different strategies that led him to the presidency of North America, the rejection of the reforms raised by the former Italian minister Matteo Renzi, among the most outstanding news.
We could put together a puzzle and find a close relationship between fake news, false information or fake news and social networks; however, it would be naive of us to believe that there is not a prepared gear, a propagandistic, media, political and viral infrastructure that has devalued the truth to leave it to the service and benefit of their own interests.
The Real Academia de la Lengua Española (Royal Academy of the Spanish Language) describes post - truth as the “deliberate distortion of a reality, which manipulates beliefs and emotions in order to influence public opinion and social attitudes”.
This term has become commonplace in political analyses where truth is not a priority but something irrelevant, undesirable and could even be considered unprofitable, because the numbers are there to generate profits.
The second term with which we are familiar is “democracy” but do we know exactly what it means for a nation? Do we understand the concept to such an extent that we can see it as fair and expedient? Robert Dahl's (1991) political thought in his pluralist theory of democracy posited that the people are the only legitimate authority to rule. While two Western thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, visualized democracy as a government of the ignorant and incapable, where the poor and the powerless reign. We could say that in democracy, society has an essential participation, which adopts political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote (Schumpeter, J. 1942).
As individuals, we are in constant evolution and in a permanent process of communicating what we do and what we say, of receiving information and spreading it as something imperative, arriving without realizing it, at the theory of peers, which describes the role of prosumers who are no longer limited to simply being receivers of information, but can also become senders. The peers function in the Internet ecosystem, where resources are used for different purposes and can sometimes be kept anonymous. But if the intention is to be visible, then the manifestations are translated in different ways such as a blog, a comment, a tweet or a purchase in social networks (Alonso and Arébalos, 2010). Peers and the media, whether traditional or digital, have a feedback strategy and it is at this point where it is decided whether this feedback is directed to share excessively, without contrasting or verifying political news or there are few who decide to maintain the line of prudence before flooding the sea of emotions in which we are involved and to which the post-truth leads us.
Gregorio Cano Figueroa, in Diario Clarín, November 2016, goes straight to define post-truth as a phenomenon in which “objective facts are less influential in the formation of public opinion than the appeal to emotion and popular belief”. What if we think he's right? We conclude that we allow ourselves to be dazzled and captivated by speeches and well-crafted propaganda, which alters our senses and appeals to our emotions, leaving aside the verification and analysis of facts, giving way to disinformation, turning post-truth into an element immersed in our society that asks for democracy but strives to destroy it, that wants the truth but turns it into a new form of lying. The good news is that this phenomenon has been identified, and worldwide, future political scenarios will be different.
BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES CONSULTED
- Böll - Stiftung, H. (2020). A Companion to Democracy 3. Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation: Causes, Trends, and Their Influence on Democracy. E-Paper. https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2020-08/200825_E-Paper3_ENG.pdf
- Berckemeyer, F., Cruz, M, Gooch, A. (2017). The post-truth era: reality vs. perception. Developing Ideas - Llorente & Cuenca, Uno Magazine. https://www.revista-uno.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/UNO_27.pdf
- D'Ancona, M. (2017). Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, Matthew d'Ancona. Ebury Press. http://anmtresawapo43.com/?book=1785036874
- Miranda Delgado, R. (2017). Democracy: four elements for a concept. Revista en línea el Grupo de Investigación de Filosofía Práctica e Historia de las Ideas.
- Fuller, S. (2018). Post-Truth: Knowledge As a Power Game. London, UK: Anthem Press.
