Autopsy of Post - postmodern Communication - Shift of paradigm for Homo Digitalis Noufou Ouedraogo

This book provides profound reflections on how communication can strengthen democracy in a world dominated by ‘fake news epidemic’ and controlled by greedy propagandists. Regarding the formulation of the book’s title – Autopsy of Post-postmodern Communication: A shift of paradigm for Homo Digitalis – it is worth demonstrating the death of communication, and the rise of miscommunication, in the post-postmodern era in order to discuss the autopsy of communication. Actually, the challenge of democratization and its corollary concept of modernization is to create economic, political and societal progresses, allowing people to live together peacefully in a social cohesion; and communication should play a starring role in this process. However, the French researcher Dominique Wolton observed in 2020 that the digital era brought about ‘MISCOMMUNICATION’ in the current society. This book pursues four key objectives: It aims firstly to comprehend the concept of ‘Soft Lie Diplomacy’ – considered as a complementarity between Soft Power and Smart Power (Nye, 1990) – employed by politics in paralysed democracies. Hence, I demonstrate in the first section that Hard Power, Smart Power and Soft Power mechanisms function perfectly today only when they are somehow diluted in the strategical use of Soft Lie Diplomacy. Thereafter,the second section of the book focuses on the use of media by politics to shape reality in the public sphere. As for the third section, it is all about how Media symbolisms have affected the Consumption process in the 21 st century, creating de facto a shift of paradigm. Ultimately, the last section of the book investigates the Social Media Literacy and fake news consumption in a context of crisis, applying the Covid-19 pandemic as a concrete case study.