Post-truth

This blog is a response to a task assigned by Dilip Barad sir(Department of English, MKBU). In this blog I tried to give my views about Post-truth.

What is Post-truth?

"Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

The term comes from an idea that became popular during the 2016 election campaign in the United States. The 21st is the century of information; people keep knowledge in their pockets. But now new questions arise about whether all the information and knowledge we get through social media, news channels, and newspapers is true or just a modified truth.

It is related to our belief system. Why do we believe? How do we see the truth? It is always related to our conditioning of the mind. We like to believe what gives us delight, which gives us the gratification that whatever we used to believe before that's true, we were right. So while conditioning of mind moulds our belief system, there is a loophole where people can use that inclination of our mind to make us believe, which is totally wrong, but due to our personal gain or triumph of our own ideas, others can make us believe in lies.

It is not a totally new thing that came out of nowhere, but it was there, but now, through social media and news channels, it is too easy nowadays to manipulate ideas and interchange the truth with lies. Through social media algorithms, we see things that we have seen before and liked. By using that data, social media shows us the same posts, which accelerates our inclination towards any idea or belief. This becomes an useful tool for politicians to manipulate people and make them believe whatever they say is the truth.

For example, a person supports any political party, and a person sees only positive news about that party daily. It would create a type of mindset that gets delight in the praise of the party, but when someone points out the facts or wrong things about the party, the person will not be able to see it as a fact, but rather the person will connect it with the nation. He or she will not differentiate between a nation and a political party. A person will always support that political party without checking the facts.