Social Media Experiences and Narratives Formation of Opinions in the Age of Post – Truth

Abstract

Social Media Experiences and Narratives Formation of Opinions in the Age of Post – Truth. The emotion and opinion become the pillars of facts and figures in post-truth political condition. The rise of social media and the phenomenon of "my opinion is worth more than the facts" are fundamentals of post-truth. Everybody can publish their opinion and furnish that as facts. The role and structure of public opinion and leaders need to be revisited in this context. In the wake of digitalization and digitization, the social media users become part of big data through which power controllers reshape the policies and democratic values. This paper focuses on narratives of eighteen social media users from Achrol village (Jaipur, Rajasthan) and tries to understand the logic of social media engagement and participation. The paper tries to argue that the big data is subjective and what it quantifies is not closer to objective truth through the narratives of individual datum (users). The paper builds its argument on "opportunities to improve on the truth" (Keyes, 2004) where the anonymity and identity catastrophe in social media helps to disseminate the opinions as facts.