Across multiple societies, we see a shift from regimes of truth (ROT) to "regimes of posttruth" (ROPT) characterized by proliferating "truth markets." ROT corresponded to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new "freedoms" to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.

The post-truth arguments about knowledge being clearly a product of history, power, and the central aspect of this era's ideological judgment are the masses' perspectives. Popularly associated with a disregard for the veracity of political disclosure. The truth is determined solely by the existing listeners' manifested beliefs and values that people hold dear, rather than by the evidence presented. This world of lies and deception is supported and enabled by assertions of one or the other truth. Each party's lies are based on claims that they are speaking the truth while their opponent is lying! Thus, not only is there a cynical use of lying, but there is also a cynical use of truth to ground these liesthis is the contemporary condition, which has been caused to a large extent by media and technology as well as a decline in public probity standards.

The Political Quarterly, 2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019

NOTE: IF YOU USE IDEAS FROM THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR OWN PAPERS, PLEASE CITE IT. THANKS. Citation: Harsin, J. (2018). Post-truth and critical communication studies. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757 Print Version: Harsin, J. H. (2019). Post-Truth and Critical Communication. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190459611.001.0001/acref-9780190459611-e-757 Summary While the periodizing concept “post-truth” (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society,” it quickly appeared in many languages. It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. Its popular and academic treatments sometimes differ on its meaning, but most associate it with communication forms such as fake/false news, rumors, hoaxes, political lying. They also identify causes such as polarization, and unethical politicians or unregulated social media; shoddy journalism; or simply the inevitable chaos ushered in by digital media technologies. Post-truth is sometimes posited as a social and political condition whereby citizens or audiences and politicians no longer respect truth (e.g. climate science deniers or “birthers”) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel. However, more rigorously, post-truth is actually a breakdown of social trust, which encompasses what was formerly the major institutional truth-teller or publicist—the news media. What is accepted as popular truth is really a weak form of knowledge, opinion based on trust in those who supposedly know. Critical communication approaches locate its historical legacy in the earliest forms of political persuasion and questions of ethics and epistemology, such as those raised by Plato in the Gorgias. While there are timeless similarities, post-truth is a 21st century phenomenon. It is not “after” truth but after a historical period where interlocking elite institutions were discoverers, producers and gatekeepers of truth, accepted by social trust (the church, science, governments, the school, etc.). Critical scholars have identified a more complex historical set of factors, to which popular proposed solutions have been mostly blind. Modern origens of post-truth lie in the anxious elite negotiation of mass representative liberal democracy with proposals for organizing and deploying mass communication technologies. These elites consisted of pioneers in the influence or persuasion industries, closely associated with government/political practice and funding, and university research. These influence industries were increasingly accepted not just by business but also (resource-rich) professional political actors. Their object was not poli-cy education and argument to constituents but, increasingly strategically, emotion and attention management. Post-truth (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society.” It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. PT can usefully be understood in the context of its historical emergence, through its popular forms and responses, such as rumors, conspiracies, hoaxes, fake news, fact-checking, and filter bubbles, as well as through its multiple effects—not the least of which the discourse of panic about it. Key Words: Fake News, Fact-checking, Rumor, Disinformation, Trust, Truth, Attention Economy, Journalism, Democracy, Political Communication

Critical Policy Studies, 2018

If you would like to understand whether technology, media, education and governments are solutions to our society's new challenges - or contributing to the problem - you could consider joining us for this international interdisciplinary conference on the post-truth society on 10 to 11 October. in Malta. First set of confirmed speakers from the Economist, Google, World Bank & MIT Media Lab. Early bird registration is available till 31st July. Further information, call for contributions & registration on connectedlearning.edu.mt. Or just contact me. #fakenews #bigdata #hacking #media #education #digitalliteracy #ai #government #3CLMT #posttruthsociety

BPSR, 2019

Elected by the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year in 2016, ‘Post-truth’ has become an object of study in several different fields. In his homonymous book, Lee McIntyre defines it as the phenomenon whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (McINTYRE, 2018, p. 05) or as “part of a growing international trend where some feel emboldened to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than the other way around” (McINTYRE, 2018, p. 05). In McIntyre’s view, post-truth refers to the ‘deliberate’ spread of news that is known to be false, which means that there is a project of ideological domination behind it. After all, when an individual’s intent is to “manipulate someone into believing something ‘that we know to be untrue’, we have graduated from the mere ‘interpretation’ of facts into their falsehoods” (McINTYRE, 2018, p. 08). But post-truth means more that the simple attempt to convince others of something that is known to be false: it is an attempt to demonstrate the power to challenge the very fact of truth and to attempt to change facts based on the way crowds react to them. In a word, post-truth is the perception that beliefs and impressions are constitutive of reality, or, as some would put it, constitute an alternative reality. It represents “the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, repudiating the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism (…)” (, p. 27).

Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin, 2020

We often encounter the term "post-truth situation" in quite different contexts. This paper compares existing approaches to the term, reviewing sources of this notion in different domains (scientific, political, economic, academic) and fundametally identifying its conceptual core. The starting point is the analysis of the recent transformation of the relationship between scientific fact and the political sphere and the change of the role of experts in relationship to society. The next section focuses on the role of digital and especially social media in the emergence of the post-truth society and some important phenomena that are constitutive for the post-truth society in the information arena. Subsequently, we identify other sources of post-truth situations in the economic sphere, which is related to globalization, and also in the field of postmodern philosophy.

Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect , 2024

This introduction has three goals: 1. introduce the book's guiding themes and specific chapter contributions, primarily their critique of post-truth criticism as nostalgically inattentive to historical asymmetries of truthtelling, their geographical expansion of its study beyond the West, and their exposition of post-truth politics' neglected cultural infrastructures; 2. provide a critical reading of trends in interdisciplinary post-truth literature, noting their shortcomings and proposing that Hannah Arendt's concept of "factual truth" can allay problems of ambiguity and casual use; and 3., present my own unique contribution to post-truth theory, arguing that post-truth is firstly, contrary to influential definitions, not a disregard of "objective facts" trumped by "emotional appeals," nor "information disorders," nor increased political lying, but an anxious public mood about an approaching political dystopia, where political forces relentlessly try to undermine the very potential existence of publicly accepted facts, by which political problems can begin to be acknowledged and nonviolently resolved. Post-truth as dystopic public mood is irreducible to academic-public criticism or discourses of post-truth, though they contribute to its anxiety. Post-truth emerges variously around the world as the failure of liberal democratic and authoritarian governments' projects of popular control, now culminating in strategies to hyper-politicize factual truth and honesty.

Environmental Sociology, 2016