Post-Truth Society? An Eliasian Sociological Analysis of Knowledge in the 21st Century

Abstract

This article draws on Elias’s sociology of knowledge to delineate the social processes that have culminated in the development of the post-truth phenomenon. It argues that technological and social changes have led to a complex commingling of increased emotion and increasingly ‘rational’ debating techniques. These have been accompanied by an increasing human capacity to consider issues on multiple ‘levels’ and anticipate the varied ways in which different audiences could perceive particular propositions. While these changes explain the polarisation of views characteristic of post-truth, the theory of informalisation is invoked to explain the relative absence of shame at the public exposure of ‘untruths’. The article expands debates in communication and science and technology studies to locate post-truth as an emergent form of knowledge contingent upon new forms of communication, a re-structuring of social interdependencies and changes in modes of thinking. In so doing, it advances the sociological analysis of knowledge.