POST-TRUTH CULTURE ENGULFS PHL

By Philip M. Lustre Jr.

Those lies and deception, fake news, hoax sites and trolls, and bellyaching, rants, curses and expletives are things we have to live with and endure. They constitute the new normal.

The explanation is simple. What has been described as post-truth culture has reached our shores and engulfed the Philippines These negative issues have become a way of life.

The post-truth culture refers to the spate of sociocultural phenomena, which are largely based on emotions and falsification of truths, making those half-truths and untruths as the new normal

Scholars said the emergence of this new culture is largely a function of the 24-hour news cycle, distortion of journalistic tenets, of which truth, balance and neutrality are sacrificed, and the ubiquitous presence of social media dwelt largely by empowered but largely uninformed or even illiterate netizens.

In post-truth cultural setting, facts are sacrificed in the name of personal biases and presumptions.  Ordinary citizens hardly know the difference between facts and opinions.

Between a verified or verifiable fact and an unconfirmed presumption, preconception, or opinion, the latter takes precedence.

Public debates are characterized by emotions and not arguments based on solid facts. Major political players hardly present solid facts that have become part of history, but lies containing facts distorted to the highest contemptible level.

What is taking place is a paradox of extreme annoyance.

The emergence of the Internet, or the information superhighway that has triggered the ongoing Information Revolution and social media has given the entire world an oversupply of facts.

Yet, what it has is a crisis of facts, as people of the world could hardly discern and embrace the truths among those facts.

Hence, those rants, expletives, and curses are but expressions of the citizens’ feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and inferiority amid the dizzying pace of information dissemination.

This post-truth culture is expected to be a temporary issue, a transitory madness.

It would not linger, as the better informed among the citizenry take the center stage to counter its disastrous and debilitating effects. The counter-reactions could be devastating too.

In social media, the trend is for informed citizens to separate the chaff from the grain. It is a growing reality for these citizens to delete posts based on half-truths, lies, and deceptions, and block those trolls.

Fakes news and hoax sites are being exposed left and right. They are no longer taken seriously.

It’s just a matter of time when the ship corrects its course. It will certainly.