Blogthread: Voice, Authenticity and More…

Continuing the blogthread among AKMA, Dave Rogers and AKMA (see the end of this entry) on authenticity, preaching, marketing and just about everything…

The latest entries are beautifully written, nuanced, thoughtful … everything I’ll mess up if I try to summarize them here. They have to do with whether authenticity for corporations is possible. But this has raised the question of what authenticity is for real individuals.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term “authenticity” but it names a concept that nevertheless we seem to need. I think this blogthread points to two places where the basic model of authenticity falls apart. As I understand the term, “authenticity” assumes that there is a public outer self and an inner private self and that the two are intimately related. “Sincerity” has to do with how accurately the outer self represents the inner self’s intentions, while “authenticity” has to do with how well the outer self represents the inner self’s self-understanding. Or maybe it just has to do with how well the inner self understands itself, which then gets reflected in the outer self.

If something like that is the case, here are two places where the term just doesn’t fit very well:

(1) Marketing. The problem isn’t a lack of sincerity, for marketing can reflect excellent intentions (although it’s rare because it has to fight the corporate entity’s inherent greed). The problem is that there’s no inner self to a corporation. It is an organization, not an individual. So the model within which “authenticity” makes sense breaks down.

(2) The Web. I’m less confident about this, but it seems to me that the Web frees us to create online selves that are personae. If your outer self doesn’t pretend to represent your inner self, you’re now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity. Asking “Is RageBoy authentic?” doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you were to discover, as per AMKA, that Ben & Jerry are polluting, right-wingers who have their ice cream made in Tunisian sweat shops, you would feel like you’d been lied to. If I were to tell you that Chris Locke is actually a sweet, kind man, you wouldn’t feel betrayed any more than if I were to tell you that Nabokov — despite Lolita — actually wasn’t a murderous pedophile.

This is why I’m so interested in the ways in which our Web selves are literary. (I’m sort of working on a sort of book proposal on this idea. Unlikely to succeed, so don’t hold me to it.)

Blogthreads (alphabetical order):

AKMA and AKMA
Tom Matrullo and Tom Matrullo
Dave Rogers, Dave Rogers, Dave Rogers
Me and me

Categories: Uncategorized dw