Post-truth and the Search for Objectivity: Political Polarization and the Remaking of Knowledge Production
Abstract
The United States has entered an era of “post-truth” as even seemingly proven facts seem open to contestation. The contests over facts range from the existential (when conservatives deny climate change) to the trivial (when the Trump administration questions the audience figures of its own inauguration ceremony). This essay combines two literatures on post-truth that rarely speak to each other: institutional political science analyses of American political polarization and STS analyses of “objectivity” in science and public life. I argue that post-truth is the outcome of two interlocking processes that have transformed the American public sphere: (1) the re-configuring of American political identities around the Republican and Democratic parties, and (2) the establishment of an alternative media ecosystem around the Republican Party whose legitimacy derives from its questioning of the “objectivity” of mainstream media institutions. Drawing on STS theorizations of the construction of objectivity, I contend that to recreate an objective public sphere will require an institutional arrangement that is based not on demarcating facts from values—or right facts from wrong facts—but on demarcating people and institutions who seek to enter this public sphere.
References
Achenbach, Joel. 2015. “Why Science Is so Hard to Believe.” Washington Post, February 12. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-science-is-so-hard-to-believe/2015/02/12/2ff8f064-b0a0-11e4-886b-c22184f27c35_story.html.
Ananny, Mike. 2018. Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Anderson, C. W. 2018. Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Beck, Julie. 2017. “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind.” The Atlantic, March 13. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/.
Berry, Jeffrey M., and Sarah Sobieraj. 2014. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. 1st edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
boyd, danah. 2018. “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?” Data & Society: Points, March 9. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2.
Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, and Martin Weinel. 2017. “STS as Science or Politics?” Social Studies of Science 47 (4): 580–86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717710131.
Corley, Pamela C., Amy Steigerwalt, and Artemus Ward. 2013. The Puzzle of Unanimity: Consensus on the United States Supreme Court. 1st edition. Stanford, California: Stanford Law Books.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2010. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
Davis, Jenny L., and Nathan Jurgenson. 2014. “Context Collapse: Theorizing Context Collusions and Collisions.” Information, Communication & Society 17 (4): 476–485. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.888458.
Drum, Kevin. 2017. “Donald Trump Edits a Tweet.” Mother Jones (blog), February 17. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/donald-trump-edits-tweet/.
Farrell, Henry, and Daniel W. Drezner. 2007. “The Power and Politics of Blogs.” Public Choice 134 (1): 15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-007-9198-1.
Flynn, D. J., Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler. 2017. “The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs about Politics.” Political Psychology 38: 127–150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12394.
Frickel, Scott, Rebekah Torcasso, and Annika Anderson. 2015. “The Organization of Expert Activism: Shadow Mobilization in Two Social Movements.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 20 (3): 305–323. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-20-3-305.
Fuller, Steve. 2016. “Embrace the Inner Fox: Post-Truth as the STS Symmetry Principle Universalized.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (blog), December 25. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://social-epistemology.com/2016/12/25/embrace-the-inner-fox-post-truth-as-the-sts-symmetry-principle-universalized-steve-fuller/.
Gauchat, Gordon. 2012. “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.” American Sociological Review 77 (2): 167–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412438225.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–64. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738.
———. 2014. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton
Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2016. “Algorithms, Clickworkers, and the Befuddled Fury around Facebook Trends.” Nieman Lab (blog), May 19. Accessed 1 April 2019. http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/algorithms-clickworkers-and-the-befuddled-fury-around-facebook-trends/.
Graves, Lucas. 2016. Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grossmann, Matt, and David Hopkins. 2016a. “How the Conservative Movement Has Undermined Trust in Academe.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), October 11. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/10/11/how-conservative-movement-has-undermined-trust-academe-essay.
Grossmann, Matt, and David A. Hopkins. 2016b. Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. New York: Oxford University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan, and Heather Paxson. 2005. “Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology.” In Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, 180–205. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoffman, Steve G. 2018. “The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4: 444–452. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2018.259.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 2007. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kahan, Dan M., David A. Hoffman, Danieli Evans, Neal Devins, Eugene Lucci, and Katherine Cheng. 2015. “‘Ideology’ or ‘Situation Sense’? An Experimental Investigation of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2590054. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2590054.
Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. 1st edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2017. “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.” The New Yorker, February 20. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.
Konnikova, Maria. 2014. “I Don’t Want to Be Right.” The New Yorker, May 16. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right.
Losse, Kate. 2019. “The False Promise of Silicon Valley’s Quest to Save the World.” The New Republic, February 7. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://newrepublic.com/article/153034/false-promise-silicon-valleys-quest-save-world.
Marres, Noortje. 2018. “Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4: 423–443. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2018.188.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–133. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313.
Mooney, Chris. 2011. “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science.” Mother Jones, May. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/denial-science-chris-mooney/.
———. 2012. The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality. 1st edition. Hoboken, N.J. : Chichester: Wiley.
———. 2015. “The Science of Why You Really Should Listen to Science and Experts.” Washington Post, April 6. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/04/06/the-science-of-why-you-really-should-listen-to-experts/
Nicas, Jack. 2018. “Alex Jones Said Bans Would Strengthen Him. He Was Wrong.” The New York Times, November 26. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-infowars-bans-traffic.html.
Nissenbaum, Helen. 2009. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. 1st edition. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Law Books.
Nunez, Michael. 2016. “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” Gizmodo, May 9. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006.
Phillips, Whitney. 2018. “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online.” Data and Society: Reports. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/.
Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Resnick, Brian. 2017. “7 Psychological Concepts That Explain the Trump Era of Politics.” Vox. March 20. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/20/14915076/7-psychological-concepts-explain-trump-politics.
Sarewitz, Daniel. 2004. “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse.” Environmental Science & Policy 7 (5): 385–403. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2004.06.001.
Schudson, Michael. 1981. Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers. 2nd edition. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Shapin, Steven. 1995. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. 1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sides, John, and Daniel J. Hopkins, eds. 2015. Political Polarization in American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sismondo, Sergio. 2017. “Post-Truth?” Social Studies of Science 47 (1): 3–6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717692076.
Starr, Paul. 2005. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. 1st edition. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Thompson, Nicholas, and Fred Vogelstein. 2018. “Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell.” Wired, February 12. Accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/.
Tucker, Joshua A., Andrew Guess, Pablo Barbera, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal, and Brendan Nyhan. 2018. “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature.” SSRN Scholarly Paper 3144139. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3144139.
Copyright (c) 2019 Shreeharsh Kelkar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors of all content published in ESTS retain the copyright to their work, and agree to license them under one of the following Creative Commons licenses CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, and refer to the individual article footer for specific licensing data. Please read our open access policy for more information.
