Post-Truth's Effect on the Brain and the Future Self: A Critical Communication Pedagogy Response

Post-truth messages have been present in our society for centuries, but their prevalence has become greatly exacerbated in recent decades due to the ease in which they can be disseminated throughout society. Neoliberal entities carefully craft these messages to accomplish economic goals and employ nefarious tactics when disseminating them. This can result in cognitive overload and temporal discounting for recipients such as students, a group that is especially susceptible to believing and internalizing these messages. These messages can have harmful effects on the mission of the university because they interfere with the pursuit of truth. However, despite the challenges these messages present, critical communication pedagogy presents a means by which young people can learn to interact with these messages in a calm and reasoned way. Well-reasoned dialogue about these messages can have the effect of better meeting the Communication discipline's goal of utilizing pedagogy that evaluates messages to effectively judge their meaning and veracity. When students learn to overcome the cognitive overload and temporal discounting that post-truth messages create, they can begin to resist them and enact meaningful change in society.