Kenya's Metamendacity History between 1885-2017 and the Ensuing "Post-Truth" Construct (PDF)

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Media History, grade: College, Moi University (Peace Institute), course: Communications-Media History, language: English, abstract: Politics the world over, and probably in all history, has always fed on incessant lies and half truths. However, the proliferation of the mass "media media-social media" convergence has engendered an explosive and domineering twist. This falls into what some thinkers now refer to as the "post-truth" era, revealing an historical angle to the pertinent subject matter. According to the Oxford dictionary "Post-truth" denote "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." It is herein acknowledged that even though post-truth concept got its initial impetus from the US' Nixonian Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, it climaxed during the 2016 Trump and Brexit campaigns, and now its synthesis blooms globally. The objective of the paper is to put the idea of post-truth into Kenyan perspective, construing the media-politics nexus there from. To achieve this, a history of colonial and post colonial systems of lies- "political-metamendacity matrix" PMM) is traced. It is established that the current wave of political lies in Kenya is a product of the very foundations of the state edifice, not only exacerbated by contemporary information implosion but also the myriad digital opportunities. The paper brings Kenya into the ongoing global conversation on the existence, meaning and ramification of the "post-truth."