Authenticity

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Dencik, Lina. 2020. Authenticity. In: Mona Baker; Bolette B. Blaagaard; Henry Jones and Luis Pérez-González, eds. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 24-29. ISBN 9781315619811 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

As discourses of the empowering nature of digital media for ordinary citizens and non-elites have developed, certain attributes of these technologies have become prominent. The question of ‘authenticity’, in particular, has received significant attention in an age that hungers for anything that feels authentic, just as we lament more and more that it is a world of inauthenticity. Social media, especially, has come to occupy an important role in this debate as social media companies and commentators have jointly advanced a myth of ‘us’; the generating of the idea that platforms like Facebook underpin a kind of natural collectivity. That is, the institutional architectures and political agendas that usually accompany mediated activity are made away with, and instead, a ‘new authenticity’ towards the public can emerge. At the same time, as the myths of depoliticized and deinstitutionalized digital media become uncovered in an age of bots, filter bubbles, and fake news, this attribution of authenticity becomes ever more complicated. This chapter will look at how the perceived authenticity of social media has been appropriated by different actors, giving examples of politicians, journalists, corporations and activists, and how this perception of social media is now being challenged by the growing debate on algorithmic design and computational propaganda as a key feature of the contemporary public sphere.

Item Type:

Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315619811

Additional Information:

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media on 21 October 2020, available online: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Encyclopedia-of-Citizen-Media/Baker-Blaagaard-Jones-Perez-Gonzalez/p/book/9780367544164. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.”

Keywords:

Digital media, authenticity, collectivity, social media.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Dates: