KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY AND THE ERA OF POST-TRUTH
Challenges to Democracy
Keywords:
Authoritarianism, Democracy, Knowledge Society, New media, Post-Truth, Power, TruthAbstract
The future of any country in the contemporary era lies in its ability to harness the knowledge potential. The fruits of knowledge society have transformed the terrain of social and political scenario of countries around the world. Democracy as a form of government, to be successful, requires a critically-engaged and politically literate population. Democracy, therefore, requires not only political literacy but also media and digital literacies given the influence of media in our lives. If democracy is viewed as a relationship between knowledge and power, there needs to be a strong distinction between the ideas, the truth of power and the power of truth. The term, 'Post- truth', signifies that objective facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal beliefs. The political processes in various democracies seem to have become more managerial and technologically fixated. There has been significant erosion in the ideas of transparency of information and political leadership has become nothing but a propaganda exercise. The paper analyses how the information technology revolution and the surge of new media has impacted the political processes in democracies, and presents the phenomenon of post-truth as a threat to the modern democratic systems.
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