Post-Truth to Post-Reality-Facing a New Era of Disinformation and Deceit

In 2015 and then again in 2016, the Cambridge Dictionary included the word post-truth, meaning a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. Politicians all over, companies, governments, and prejudiced groups are using it with impunity with the steady growth of digital platforms and traditional media. The result: non-transparency in governance, increased polarization, lack of protection of human rights, and inadequacy in critical thinking, war, and conflicts, ie Ukraine, the Middle East.

Logic, reasoning, and informed decision-making have been subjugated. Mob mentality, cult emergence, and violence have flourished with abundance. Corporate-run polarised media houses and educational institutions with media specifics are struggling. Emotions have taken over logic and well-founded beliefs have been submerged under the deluge of misinformation.

Enters AI to generate content from varying data to challenge your ability to sift fact, a verifiable fact, from fiction. Enters in this milieu immersive technologies. They have converged with AI. AR is the integration of digital information with a person’s environment in real-time. Enabled by smart glasses, AR users experience a real-world environment with increasingly realistic generated information layered on top of it. On the other hand, VR is a fully immersive 3-D artificial digital environment in which a person can have real-life business experiences, tourism, and war zones, from the desks of their rooms. In the future, they will develop the ability to connect directly to the human brain. AR and VR are referred to as XR. These technologies are used to access the metaverse where avatars will be doing business, social interactions, and interacting in various facets of the real world.

At present, the average person spends 11 hours on their mobiles or computers. In the immersive era, the average person will be spending 14 to 16 hours including metaverse. XR requires high volumes of customer data to create a more authentic experience. This data reveals your traits, mental health, cognition, drug consumption, cultural background, ideological leanings, geography, and emotional priorities.

The result of this convergence between AI, AR, and VR is that of unsolicited misinformation about products, ideologies, political climate, human rights, the mindset of students, racism, and radicalization. The new era of post-reality from post-truth is upon us. The solution lies in protecting privacy, and stringent acts to impart verifiable facts and raise sane voices rather than becoming a part of this flood of misinformation, fake news, provocation, and a reduction in protection against crass profit making. Can we prove ourselves equal to this challenge of post-truth to post-reality as communication professionals and academics, along with technology and allied sciences, is a pertinent question we must pose to ourselves.