what does authenticity mean now?
I was chatting with my partner about the meaning of the term “authenticity,” in the sense of how we, as creator industry people, use the term, and how someone without the onus to commodify it uses the word. We have family in healthcare, for example, and specifically with ties to Indigenous communities, who use authentic in its dictionary definition form. Authentic to the land, authentic to the culture which is a far cry from the “authentic” to the “culture” that I might find used in a marketing campaign. The authenticity we want to believe lives in a person feels like you’re going to hate them or love them but even if they weren’t on display via social, they’d continue existing that way and their inner world would not change for likes or followers. That perception alone. The authenticity I see marketer’s talk about is one that needs to be hated or loved to the point of a CTA; a person’s authenticity is only as good as how much engagement they can bring in. I find it hard to use the word authentic these days, like my tongue twists away from it because it does not want to be rendered jargon. Let it stay true, real. We need people and their authenticity more now than ever. If they don’t know it yet, we need to give them space to find it (and not feed it to AI along the way).