Donald Trump. Press Association/Chuck Burton. All rights reserved.
When it comes to unravelling 2016’s ‘post-truth, populist, and anti-expert’ political trifecta, analysts have squeezed all they can from the social sciences. But class divides, inequality, and globalization just seem too clunky to explain entirely why the best educated and most informed generation in human history is so close to electing the least qualified candidate ever to the highest post on the planet.
Technology — which remains alien to most socio-economic models — may offer a clue. The internet’s expanded space for public opinion and streamlined media landscape only underscores the current state of our political discourse — particularly when one in two people with online access use social media as a weekly news source, according a Reuters Institute worldwide survey. Sure we have more degrees, better schooling and fingertip access to information, but with our online lifestyles we are also more exposed to the cognitive biases that render the intellectual process moot.
