“It takes two to speak truth: One to speak, and another to hear.” Henry David Thoreau

“Authenticity”, if you haven’t noticed the hype about social networking and user-generated content like YouTube, is the buzzword du jour. In the world of marketing--which is (come on, admit it!) 100% devoted to creating mediated experiences--it ought to be philosophically jarring to talk about “authenticity”—yet no one even shrugs when you use the word.

I actually like the word “authentic” in its latest business incarnation, because it aspires to something more than cynically manipulating people’s opinions and wallets. I like to think that the people who want to sell me things are true believers who want to communicate good news to people who need it. I know, you’re thinking, what haystack did she crawl out from? But the honesty and conviction with which I hear most businesspeople and nonprofits talk about their goals convinces me that this really is true. And like all good buzzwords, “authentic” manages to describe a whole worldview in a single utterance. Everyone in the room knows what you mean when you say it, because we share a perspective. Of course! We want it to be kind of like THAT (YouTube), and THAT (Facebook), and THAT (Second Life) and yet not, really. But we want to convey the meta-level of those experiences; we want to generate that kind of loyalty and community; we want to generate a feeling that simulates the feeling generated by that which is deemed “authentic”—we too want to be perceived as “authentic” and thereby generate a similar feeling.

But it’s the classic dilemma of nerd kids (not that I’d know!) in high school --you can’t try to be cool. You can kind of mimic it, but you can’t fake its effortless originality and confidence. And (at least when I was in high school) “cool” meant what “authentic” means now—doing or allowing something utterly beyond anyone’s conceptions of what is possible or acceptable, and doing it with grace and ease; and second-comers are, by definition, not cool. Or authentic.

With “authenticity”—unlike the late 90s buzzwords like “portal” and “online community” and “e-Commerce”—we imply more than a business model or a technology. Authenticity, in all its guises, is a social stance. In some ways, the very act of using the term implies a cynicism and critical distance which precludes its own objective: to wit, if you strive to be authentic, then you can never be authentic. There’s an element of naivete to true authenticity that cannot be created, but must exist on its own; and even then, postmodern sensibilities being what they are, that which was originally heartfelt will be quickly transformed into something manufactured, dated, stale.

Yet, however counterintuitive it may seem, authenticity can be manufactured—if only because it must be. The idea that there even exists an “authentic” truth which can be discovered, much less documented, much less packaged and sold, countervails everything we know from the culture. In the 60’s, the situationists and Marshall McLuhan saw this coming miles away—the understanding that, with rapid technology development, we will manufacture, participate in, and ultimately drown in and iteratively discard our own spectacle. No experience, they believed, would be perceived as unmediated. And it’s true: we’re all waiting for the camera, the cell-phone shot, the comment on our MySpace profile.

What couldn’t be foreseen is how rapidly and easily that understanding would be assimilated by the culture, so now everyone assumes all experiences are inherently mediated—and, therefore, only the experiences which take great care to manufacture the exquisite details of their own authenticity are perceived as “real”. The simulacrum has come to pass, and our misgivings (if ever we really had any) are irrelevant.

The lesson for marketers may be the same old one you’ve always known and been taught: you still have to create, frame, and narrate perception in a way that your audience will understand; you still have to tell a story and find the right people to listen. You may tell that story with different production values, to accord with the general perception of reality or aspiration; and it may be more difficult to do than it was before, without the guise of good lighting and with the reality of media fragmentation.

But to imagine that technology has suddenly given us a tighter lock on objective reality or “authenticity” than we had before is absurd; we merely have more access to frame our own narratives. This may or may not be a good thing for democracy; it’s not a good thing for the culture; and it‘s definitely not a good thing for marketers, because the locus of control has shifted from the storyteller to the people who have absolutely no story to tell, but who clog bandwidth with useless content. Most of the content generated by users ranges from depressing to unwatchable. And their additional information streams don’t create a greater understanding of truth, reality, or the human condition--it’s just noise.

So to be successful and honest, your “authenticity” must edit that noise, provide expert information, and structure information in a usable way. If you can, at the same time, add the ideas and voices of other people—and be unafraid to do so—all the better. But to imagine that providing unmediated access to create and distribute content will build authenticity or credibility—forget it. The spectacle is what it is, so participate where you can. Build a three-ring circus; but remember that your (paid) performers are better at what they do than the audience.

Labels: culture