Mediated Authenticity

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The concept of authenticity is everywhere. It’s a buzzword used in sales slogans for everything from jeans and coffee to holiday destinations and lifestyle coaching. Yet, authenticity is also about socially constructed notions about what is real, and the media play a key role in this construction of authenticity. My aim with this book is to investigate the notion of authenticity in relation to mediations of reality.

I have not investigated the notion of mediated authenticity without support from the research community and fellow media researchers. My sincere gratitude goes to the highly competent scholars Daniel Dayan, Knut Lundby, Peter Lunt, Hallvard Moe, Ole J. Mjøs, Vilde S. Sundet, Trine Syvertsen, and Espen Ytreberg. Thanks for the inspiring comments.

A key to success is the publisher, and I am indeed thankful for the pleasure of working with editor Mary Savigar at Peter Lang Publishing. Likewise I have had the pleasure of working with brilliant people, such as language editor Nils Nadeau, research assistant Anne Nordheim, and my colleagues at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo.

I dedicate this book to my three favourite people: my daughter Oda, my son Johannes, and my partner Kjell-Olav. Thanks for encouraging me to write the book, and for being a perfect support team.

Oslo, January 2015

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THE PARADOX OF MEDIATED AUTHENTICITY

Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

—George Burns

The paradox of mediated authenticity is that although we base most of our knowledge about our society and the world in which we live on mediated representations of reality, we remain well aware that the media are constructed, manipulated, and even faked (Boorstin, 1987; Weaver, 1994; Luhmann, 2000; McChesney, 2013; Ladd, 2012). With this paradox as its starting point, this book seeks to launch and discuss the concept of mediated authenticity, which refers to how authenticity is a currency in the communicative relation between producers and audiences. Mediated authenticity is a social construction, but it traffics in representations of reality.

Mediated authenticity is achieved through production techniques and authenticity illusions, which range from minor adjustments such as lighting and sound effects to drastic post-production editing and photoshopping. In the process, raw material is manipulated so as to be compatible with the aim of reaching a large audience and fulfilling the media format’s criteria. Authenticity illusions are, for the most part, both accepted and correctly interpreted by the audience. For example, TV viewers understand that canned laughter, or the laugh track, is a technique for enhancing a comedy show, not the ← 1 | 2 → unavoidable outbursts of a real audience. I define this tacit understanding or agreement between producers and audience as an authenticity contract, but it remains a social construction, one that is based on a set of genre conventions, as well as established practises and expectations. When the authenticity contract is challenged, or broken, we face an authenticity scandal or, less dramatically, an authenticity puzzle. These two concepts both refer to a situation where the audience is uncertain of what is real and what is fake, but “the scandal” differs from “the puzzle” in that the former is about various degrees of deception, while the later is about various degrees of ambiguity.

This chapter has four main parts. Following this part, the next defines mediated authenticity and discusses its primary subcategories—trustworthiness, originality, and spontaneity. The third part further elaborates on the book’s main concepts—authenticity illusions, the authenticity contract, and authenticity scandals/puzzles—and outlines the key arguments related to these terms. The fourth, and last, part presents a brief plan for the book and a chapter outline.

Mediated Authenticity

Authenticity is a dominant tendency of contemporary culture, and our obsession with “the real,” “the genuine,” and “the authentic” interests scholars in various disciplines (Dovey, 2000; Fine, 2003; Guignon, 2004; Baudrillard, 2008). A common treatment of the term authenticity in academic literature is to position it in opposition to whatever is fake, unreal, or false, and further to acknowledge its multiple meanings. Authenticity is also seen to be an ultimately evaluative concept, and even though we try to develop value-free methods for evaluation, there are always subjective judgments involved (Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 392; Lindholm, 2008, p. 2). Likewise, and quite paradoxically, in context of the media, authenticity is generally seen to be positive, and audiences appreciate seemingly raw and unscripted moments.

The concept of authenticity is deeply rooted within cultures, and as culture changes—and with it, tastes, beliefs, values, and practises—so too do the definitions of what constitutes “the authentic.” As such, authenticity is a moving target, meaning that the concept is continually adapting to changes and trends, and it is impossible to capture its meaning with any single, static definition (Vannini & Williams, 2009, pp. 2–3). One result of the multiple meanings of authenticity and its various applications in various academic disciplines, is that many scholars choose not to define it but rather to simply ← 2 | 3 → acknowledge its complexity, such as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012), who wrote: “The authentic is tricky to define. Its definition has been subject to passionate debates involving far-ranging thinkers, from Plato to Marx, from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga” (p. 10). There are, nevertheless, comprehensive definitions of the term, such as the specification of a genealogical or historical (origin) meaning, whereby something’s origin defines its authenticity, or a reference to identity and correspondence with facts (content) meaning, as with an original signature or document (Lindholm, 2008, p. 2; Vannini & Williams, 2009, p. 2). In their highly practical orientation, however, these definitions are less suitable to analysing the media than to analysing, for example, someone’s legitimate right to the royal throne (Geary, 1986) or the viability of a Munch painting.