Post-Truth: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
University of Portsmouth
March 24th, 2018
Keynote: Professor Steve Fuller (University of Warwick)
Post-Truth, as a concept, seemed to exemplify 2016. The term, in fact, was appointed word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, underscoring its pre-eminence. The phenomenon is characterized by notions of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, and ‘false information’, but is this simply academic residue from the postmodern debate trickling down to its broader expression in social media?
Despite seeming to be singularly of the moment, it is by no means a new concept. Its origins can be found in George Orwell’s “Doublespeak” or, indeed, those real-world totalitarian governments which sought to efface the truth with their confidently stated and frequently repeated lies. Now, as in 1942, we may say that ‘intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth’.