stratfor | In the stream of post-election postmortems on journalism's
performance, "post-truth" is the handiest of explanations in a campaign
season that took fibs and fabrication to a new level. The Oxford English
Dictionary has declared "post-truth" its International Word of the
Year. A Google search on the term yields some 240 million results. Layer
what the candidates said against the "fake news" manufactured on
Facebook and elsewhere and, for some, this is all but a civilizational
threat.
But the term is actually older than we think. It was coined back in
2004 by the author Ralph Keyes. It took a while, but now it has
transformed into a new meme alive in the media ecosystem. It is an
illustrative case study of how memes emerge and dominate discourse,
refracting perceptions of political reality.
But first, a bit of background. The term "meme," devised in 1976 by
sociologist Richard Dawkins from the Greek "mimema," or "something
imitated," was originally used to describe patterns of belief that
spread vertically through cultural inheritance (from parents, for
example) or horizontally through cultural acquisition (as in film or
media). Dawkins' point was that memes act much like genes, carrying
attributes of beliefs and values between individuals and across
generations. It is even a field of academic study known as "memetics."
The Best of Intentions
Today the term meme is more popularly applied to videos, a bit of
text, a viral tweet, becoming a fixture, a short-lived canon if you
will, in social media-driven consciousness. "Post truth" is just one in a
long line of them.
Which is not to be dismissive of the underlying issue of partisans
planting fabrications into the echo chamber of partisan news media. I
share the alarm at the speed with which misleading charges or downright
falsehoods can spread through the Twittersphere. And it's not just an
evil embedded in presidential campaigns. The new media age has many dark
sides. I worry about "covert influence" that state intelligence
agencies — and not just Russia's — can and do spread. Social media as a
tool of terrorist recruitment is a real threat. While writing this
column, I chanced across the news that Facebook (inadvertently I'm sure)
enabled a far-right group in Germany to publish the names and addresses
of prominent Jews, Jewish-owned businesses and Jewish institutions on a
map of Berlin to mark the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
