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The Authenticity Industries
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The Authenticity Industries

Keeping it "Real" in Media, Culture, and Politics

Michael Serazio
Stanford UP, 2023
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An obsession with authenticity has pervaded various professions, including reality TV, social media, the music business, advertising, and consulting. Communications professor Michael Serazio warns that image makers who seek to convey authenticity often avoid rational persuasion. Instead, they strive to elicit emotions – such as, for example, feelings of nostalgia.

Summary

The perception of authenticity is vital in reality TV, social media, entertainment, advertising, and politics.

Americans have become obsessed with authenticity. Since the start of the TV era in the 1960s, people increasingly interacted with the world through screens, flattening life’s essential dimensions. Today, a yearning to retrieve a lost sense of humanity drives the quest for authenticity – even though, in reality, it requires effortlessness. Ideally, authenticity is an unforced quality, not a calculated accomplishment.

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau apparently never used the word “authenticity,” but it was central to his doctrine. Rousseau urged people to speak candidly and discover their true selves, without the restraints of social norms or other external forces. For Rousseau, inner emotion distinguishes the real from the fake, because authenticity elicits feelings that artificiality cannot. His philosophical framework was a response to societal upheaval in the 18th and 19th centuries. As industrialization spread and cities sprouted, people – enduring the urban anonymity of living among strangers – began questioning where they belonged. Many found that authenticity...

About the Author

Michael Serazio is professor of communication at Boston College. He also wrote The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerilla Marketing.

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