6.1. Authenticity

Early in the days of YouTube, one YouTube channel (lonelygirl15) started to release vlogs (video web logs) consisting of a girl in her room giving updates on the mundane dramas of her life. But as the channel continued posting videos and gaining popularity, viewers started to question if the events being told in the vlogs were true stories, or if they were fictional. Eventually users discovered that it was a fictional show, and the girl giving the updates was an actress.

Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all.

6.1.1. Why We Care About Authenticity

As a rule, humans do not like to be duped. We like to know which kinds of signal to trust, and which to distrust. Being lulled into trusting a signal only to then have it revealed that the signal was untrustworthy is a shock to the system, unnerving and upsetting. People get angry when they find they have been duped. These reactions are even more heightened when we find we have been duped simply for someone else’s amusement at having done so.

These reactions make sense. Try to imagine the early days of human social life, before we started attaching our welfare to the land in terms of planting crops and building structures designed for permanence. Our nomadic forebears functioned in groups who coordinated in highly specialized ways to ensure the survival of the whole. Although such communities are often pictured as being prehistoric, primitive, and obsolete, we now know that such societies were and are highly sophisticated, often developing and depending on highly specified legal codes, some of which are still in use today in Bedouin communities in North Africa. Other nomadic groups, such as Roma people (which you may have heard derogatorily called ‘gypsies’), live within and around land-based nations and their various borders and laws. To ensure the survival of their ethnicity, cultures, and languages, they depend on being able to trust each other. The nations whose land we are living and studying on here also knew the importance of being able to know who can be trusted.

These needs may not always be as obvious in the highly individualized societies, like Post-Enlightenment Europe and the United States. The possibility for self-reliance has been created in part by making certain things dependable and instutionalized. You can go get yourself food without feeling like you have to trust anyone, because you can just

• go to the store (which has to adhere to corporate legal requirements)

• and buy food (the supply of which is made stable by complex networks of growing, manufacturing, and transportation, covered by the assurances of FDA-compliant labelling)

• from people who work there (and are subject to labor laws and HR regulations, which, if they are not followed, means the staff person does not get paid, so their wellbeing depends on them doing their job). The need to trust other people is obscured by the many institutions that we have created. Institutions have ways, sometimes, of getting around human whims and surprises. But at the end of the day, it is still hugely important to us that we feel clear about who can be trusted, and for what.

This need of ours is what leads us to place value on authenticity.

6.1.2. What Is Authenticity?

Authenticity is a rich concept, loaded with several connotations. To describe something as authentic, we are often talking about honesty, in that the thing is what it claims to be. But we also describe something as authentic when we want to say that it offers a certain kind of connection. A knock-off designer item does not offer the purchaser the same sort of connection to the designer brand that an authentic item does. Authenticity in connection requires honesty about who we are and what we’re doing; it also requires that there be some sort of reality to the connection that is supposedly being made between parties. Authentic connections frequently place high value on a sense of proximity and intimacy. Someone who pretends to be your friend, but does not spend time with you (proximity) or does not open themselves up to trusting mutual interdependence (intimacy) is offering one kind of connection (being an acquaintance) under the guise of a different kind of connection (friendship).

This is not to say that there is no room for appreciating connections that are not fully honest, transparent, and earnest all the time. Social media spaces have allowed humor and playfulness to flourish, and sometimes humor and play are not, strictly speaking, honest. Often, this does not bother us, because the kind of connection offered by joke accounts matches the jokey way they interact on social media. We get to know a lot about public figures and celebrities, but it is not usually considered problematic for celebrity social media accounts to be run by publicist teams. As long as we know where we stand, and the kind of connection being offered roughly matches the sort of connection we’re getting, things go okay.

Inauthentic interaction can even be valuable. We might outright lie to someone to cover our tracks when planning them a surprise party. Once the surprise is revealed, the inauthentic interactions can be retrospectively reinterpreted, and offense is not taken. We play many different roles, and many different games, in the course of a social life, and sometimes we are more authentic than others. Inauthenticity can be a calculated risk, like that taken when planning someone a surprise party and using a few judicious lies in the process, or it can be an artefact of how complicated it is to be ourselves in a many-faceted world. But, you might notice, people don’t often use the word ‘inauthentic’ to refer to the kinds of surprises that do not bother or upset. Mostly, the term ‘authenticity’ points to a mismatch or incongruity between how a connection is offered and how it plays out, when that mismatch is problematic. (A professional ethicist would say this means that ‘authenticity’ is a “normatively loaded” term.)

There are many ways to define and talk about authenticity and why it matters to people, but for purposes of this book, we will use the following definition:

Authenticity

Authenticity is a concept we use to talk about connections and interactions when the way the connection is presented matches with the reality of how it functions. An authentic connection can be trusted because we know where we stand. An inauthentic connection offers a surprise, because what is offered is not what we get. An inauthentic connection could be a good surprise, but usually, when people use the term ‘inauthentic’, they are indicating that the surprise was in some way problematic: someone was duped.

We value authenticity because it has a deep connection to the way humans use social connections to manage our vulnerability and to protect ourselves from things that threaten us. When we form connections, it is like all our respective vulnerabilities get entangled and tied together. We depend on each other, so if you betray me I face a loss in wellbeing. But also, since you did that, now you face a loss in wellbeing, as I no longer have your back. That means that both of us have an incentive not to betray or take advantage of each other, for our mutual protection.

When someone presents themselves as open and as sharing their vulnerabilities with us, it makes the connection feel authentic. We feel like they have entangled their wellbeing with ours by sharing their vulnerabilities with us. Think about how this works with celebrity personalities. Jennifer Lawrence became a favorite of many when she tripped at the Oscars, and turned the moment into her persona as someone with a cool-girl, unpolished, unfiltered way about her. She came across as relatable and as sharing her vulnerabilities with us, which let many people feel that they had a closer, more authentic connection with her. Over time, that persona has come to be read differently, with some suggesting that this open-styled persona is in itself also a performance. Does this mean that her performance of vulnerability was inauthentic?