I don't care about the truth, tell me a good story: narrativity as discourse, credibility as condition

Abstract

The advent of the 21st century has brought with it a more complex and contradictory society. The progressive integration of consumer society, mass media, technological innovations in the field of communications, internet and social media has created an extremely visual and hyper-narrative society that can be framed as the storytelling society in the American-driven West. This hyper-narrativity has degenerated into what has been termed “infodemic” or informative pandemic, merged with older concepts like fake news, conspiracy theory and post-truth. I suggest, as filter of or counterpower to this hyper-narrativity, the concept of “credibility.” Departing from Niklas Luhmann’s “trust-confidence” theory, the “credibility” theory reflects our “liquid” 21st-century society—in which modernist concepts like “truth,” “fake,” “false” and “veracity” have loosened their meanings—by proposing a “credibility factor” that is closely related to the experience of the receiver and defined by its relationship to the sender through the mass and social media sphere.