Navigating a Post-Truth World
Jackie Kremer, Head of Library Academic Partnerships & Assessment, Fairfield University
The Oxford English Dictionary (ÔED) selected “post-truth” as its 2016 Word of the Year, beating out such words as alt-right, coulrophobia (an extreme or irrational fear of clowns) and Latinx (a gender-neutral Latino or Latina) as words that showed dramatic increased usage in 2016. The ÔED defines post-truth as “‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” Now let’s think about this term for a minute: Does “post-truth” accurately reflect the zeitgeist of our times or is its spike in usage an election year fad? I venture the opinion that it is the former and that post-truth thinking will shape our society for many years to come. I am not alone in my opinion. For example, see William Davies’s “The Age of Post-Truth Politics” and David Ignatius’s “In Today’s World, The Truth Is Losing.” This issue poses significant challenges for those of us in higher education. How do we educate our students to be global citizens and agents of change if our culture no longer views the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion as a worthwhile pursuit and even questions the existence of objective fact?
In our new information ecosystem, we see social media as the dominant force in news distribution. We now have the ability to filter our sources to reflect our own points of view, crowding out previous traditional authoritative sources and allowing many of us to create our own echo chambers. This new ecosystem is the perfect environment for “fake news.” Here I am not talking about satirical news, but instead referring to news that is intentionally fabricated to make money or advance a particular ideology. See BBC’s story The Saga of 'Pizzagate': The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread as an example.
With so much information swamping us, how can we tell what is true? These websites may be useful starting points:
1. For political fact checking, try Politifact, Factcheck.org and Fact Checker from The Washington Post.
2. To check suspicious internet stories, go to snopes.com. Snopes.com has been debunking rumors since 1995.
But these tools cannot replace critical thinking. We can do more to develop our own media literacy and information literacy skills and to teach those skills to our students. For years, academic libraries have been using the CRAPP test, teaching students to critically look at the information in terms of five criteria: currency, relevancy, authority, accuracy and purpose/point of view. This critical examination process helps us to suss out fake news from legitimate and to decide for ourselves what is fact or opinion.
I invite you to learn more at DiMenna-Nyselius Library’s Critically Evaluating Information Guide. Lastly, the University’s mission statement emphasizes a “common commitment to truth and justice.” I invite you to read the University’s mission and reflect on your unique role in accomplishing it.
