When Did Britain s Age of Deference End – and Why? historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“Truth” is now a quaint term in American (and many other) societies. It has frequently been remarked that we live in a “post-truth” age, one characterized by “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Scholars and news commentators now distinguish between “beliefs” and facts, and warn us that public opinion is guided more by belief than by fact. Some blame social media for creating a world in which there are no generally accepted signposts, but even long before the (recent) advent of social media, information technology provided each of us with his/her personal printing press. The hope was that access to plentiful and “free” information would produce a more open, creative and democratic world. But, for now at least, the opposite seems to be the case. Americans live in a world in which one of the two major political parties has as its platform a demonstrable lie – that its leader won the 2020 presidential election. What does a “lie” mean in this context? What is
“If put into print and translated into other languages, texts of this sort could also be used to publicize a country’s legal and political system across borders, and put a particular polity on the map” – Linda Colley pointed out in a conversation with Lénárd Sándor.