post Truth

post-truth 

the word of the year -2016

post-truth is an adjective defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objectives facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

what is post truth?

Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth" and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alternative facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth".

post- truth and politics

  A political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Scholars and popular commentators disagree about whether post-truth is a label that is newly generated but can be applied to phenomena such as lying in any historical period; or whether it is historically specific, with empirically more recent observable causes.

Post-truth politics is a subset of the broader term post-truth, which has historical roots prior to the recent focus on political events. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes. However, academic development of post-truth as a concept does not entirely reflect the Oxford Dictionaries' original emphasis on "circumstances" where appeals to "objective facts" fail to influence as much as "appeals to emotion and personal belief." The "circumstances" noted by the original dictionary definition have been expanded to denote a historical period, defined by clear historical shifts in communication and media institutions (for example, "gatekeeping" and "agenda-setting," as well as fragmentation of "mass audiences" into segmented markets, receiving different information) spectrum of political actors, and resources available to them (for example "big data" analysis, use of cognitive science to persuade), and an empirically documented rise of massive social distrust.While the term "post-truth" had no dictionary entry before Oxford Dictionaries' entry in 2016, the Oxford entry was inspired by the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign; it was thus already implicitly referring to politics.