Disrupted realities: Truth and meaning in the digital age and its psycho-social implications


Neil Wegenschimmel, University of Waterloo

Revolutions in digital technology have eroded the ability of people to live in a mutually-established shared reality, see life as meaningful, and know what is true. Shared reality is important for the maintenance and generation of happiness and well-being, and provides a basis for community formation and social-civil solidarity. Monopolistic technology companies have erected a digital cage around individual psychological states, prodding and manipulating interactions to profit from the enframing of digital behaviour. In this context, the role of social media platforms and their algorithms in shaping our perceptions and beliefs cannot be overstated. They have become the gatekeepers of information, deciding what we see, when we see it, and how it is presented to us. This has profound implications for our understanding of truth and reality. Bringing together research and literature on communication, social psychology, cognition, political science and social character, I provide an extension of the concept of epistemosis: a psychosocial state that leaves people unable or unwilling to discern what is true or real. In doing so, I incorporate elements of uncertainty, threat, as well as existential and political psychology into a theoretical model that endeavours to map the relationship between novel digital technology, human meaning-making and deliberation, and growing polarization and extremism. I posit a situation whereby the mixture of information proliferation and overabundance, competing emotionally salient narratives, and the hyperreal environment of the internet as a mechanism for sharing information is filtered through algorithmic logics to undermine the interplay between group dynamics and cognitive processes of establishing truth and accuracy, producing a suspicion toward reality itself that becomes the dominant framework for understanding the world. In doing so I will present recent empirical research that probes the relationship between problems of information and authoritarian social characters, offering examples of how epistemotic informational environments may be not just affecting individuals negatively, but rather pushing them headlong into an openness to authoritarianism, and leading to polarization and the ominous possibility of “reality collapse.” I will present prominent case studies that demonstrate the results of this dynamic in action, and consider where these trends may go as technological acceleration increases, particularly with the wide use of artificial intelligence, uncanny deep fakes, and large language models — all while the world grows increasingly fragmented. This work lays at the intersection of psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science and studies of communication, theorizing from an interdisciplinary perspective that attempts to take up the task of tracing the strange world we have come to inhabit, one that moves so quickly that it has become difficult to both study and theorize. Some consideration will also be given to currents of 20th century social and cultural history, and how various threads may have come together in ways that are threatening both the individual’s sense of themselves in the world and democratic society itself. The rapid pace of technological change, coupled with the rise of global networks, has created a complex and ever-changing landscape that challenges our traditional ways of understanding and interacting with the world. This has led to a sense of disorientation and uncertainty, further exacerbating the issues outlined above.

This paper will be presented at the following session: