That’s a paraphrase of the title of a book I’m reading right now, David Boyle’s Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. This lust for real life is behind much of what’s happening on the web, including blogging and other forms of social expression like MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube. For so long we’ve been separated from our humanity and from other humans by PR and marketing and commercial spin. In small amounts it was acceptable–even desirable–as we were better able to meet our various needs by being told what we wanted and what we should be. In large amounts, it makes us rebel, as we are turned into robotic consumers against our will.
Boyle proposes that the trend towards fakeness, towards spin, towards power to the producer conglomerates instead of the individual humans leads itself to the demand for authenticity:
Yet that trend has begun to spawn its opposite, and — although the demand for the real is barely showing itself above the horizon yet — it has already made itself felt in many different areas of cultural life, from poetry to politics and from food to fashion. It is beginning to be clear that the dominant cultural force of the century ahead won’t just be global and virtual, but a powerful interweaving of opposites — globalization and localization, virtual and real, with an advance guard constantly undermining what is packaged and drawing much of society along behind them.
Even in blogging these days, we find more of the packaged and the preprocessed than the real. Who can blame the bloggers, for there’s money and prestige to be had in making yourself and your blog popular. Yet that can keep us from some of the benefits of blogging not as a means of making money but as a way of connecting, not only with other people but with ourselves. Maybe this is another reason why Twitter has become so popular with a certain set–because it brings back the realness and the authenticity.
Blogging for authenticity is not without its hazards, however. It’s easy to confuse realness with stream of consciousness. What makes for authenticity versus self-indulgence in a medium like blogging? Simply writing down everything that passes through your head doesn’t amount to getting real. When should the unrevealed be revealed, and when shouldn’t it? These are difficult questions with no answers that I could make into a five or ten item list post. Sometimes I reveal things, and I embarrass myself. Other times I do, and I make a connection or I tell a more general truth than whatever happened in my own life. Writing publicly in a personal medium like blogging requires courage: courage to be proved wrong, to be embarrassed, to be found out as an impostor or worse, for who you really are.
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>for who you really are
imagine that…
As far as courage: well, courage only exists because there is fear. Tell me: what is it you fear from the web?
Especially if you blog about matters personal and professional at the same time, it’s tricky. I want to be me, which means saying how I feel about things, but not make my professional relationships more difficult. But blogs written this way are the ones I most want to read, so it’s worth it even if we screw up once in a while.
I feel like I mention her a lot, but Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka Yarn Harlot, is one of my favorite examples of someone who writes from an authentic, personal point of view. It works for her on a professional level, because what she has to say is so appealing to her readers. I think knitting may be a more forgiving field in this respect, though.
anne, this book sounds great!
Blogging isn’t new - the general idea predates the Internet as we know it today. People added their thoughts to (and spoke their minds on) listservs and IRCs for years prior. With the introduction of the Internet they began using website messageboards and forums. I know because I’ve been part of that culture since the 80s. Any demand for authenticity has long since come and gone.
Boyle misses some important points.
First, we’re not just separated by corporate PR and marketing. That’s the typical “Us versus Them” mentality nurtured by consultants at our expense. We’re also separated by impersonal technologies, namely, the Internet and email, which lower the barrier to fakeness and deception, and pit us against ourselves. There is an old saying in the security industry, “Locks do not stop thieves - they just keep the honest people honest”. Well, face-to-face communication has the same effect. It won’t stop liars and cheats, but it will keep the authentic people authentic.
If you’re looking for authenticity on the Internet, you’re looking in the wrong place. In the world of bits and bytes, your fellow human beings are no more capable of authenticity than corporate spin masters. You’ll spend far too much time trying to separate truth from fiction, genuine from fake, wheat from chaff.
If you want to share your thoughts and seek authenticity, join a local group, stand up, look at fellow members and speak your mind. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to authentic.
Second, I think more than ever the human race wants and needs a little direction to save us from ourselves. We say that isn’t true, but it is. Companies have shot themselves in their own feet by providing too much choice, too many alternatives, in an attempt to become everything to everyone. Consequently, we’ve become people struggling to find ourselves, unable to make simple decisions, spending valuable time on the wrong things (surfing the Internet instead of playing with our kids) expecting the world to cater to our individual whims but unwilling to pay the price. Unfortunately, our children and future generations are going to pay the price emotionally, physically, and financially.
Somewhere along the way red apples became Gala, Fuji, Pinklady, Macintosh, Delicious, Jona, Empire, Ida and more. The next time you’re at the market and your grocery list includes apples, try walking over to produce and reaching for a couple apples without looking at the signs or making conscious selections. Take the two minutes you saved by not mulling over which apples to purchase and give someone you love an extra long hug and tell them how much you love them.
When you take a bite out of one of the apples, perhaps it’ll taste a bit more tart than you prefer, or a bit more sweet. A little too soft or too hard. Fragrant, but perhaps not. Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things?
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[…] So that is why thanks to folks like Euan Semple or David Gurteen, amongst others, I think I am finally ready to take Twitter for a spin and actually be able to use it quite extensively while I am getting ready for my upcoming trip to Budapest. At the beginning, I doubted it would be of any use for someone like me who rather spends his time in front of the computer or doing something totally unrelated and away from it. However, while I have been observing how it has evolved, I am actually finding out how a good amount of the folks that I normally follow through their own weblogs have also started twittering or are on the verge of trying it out sharing their thoughts about their experiences thus far. […]