The Retreat of the Real
posted by Frank Pasquale
The rise of digitized images has led many journalists to worry about credentializing any photo that comes their way. That skepticism is starting to spread:
Bloggers, who had already appointed themselves watchdogs over reporters, editors and producers, were now taking on photographers. While the goal of increased transparency in the media is laudable, it may foster greater cynicism about journalistic ethics. “Photographers were always able to manipulate pictures in the darkroom,” says Keith Morrison, a former Calgary Herald photographer who is now publisher of C-ing Magazine, a publication about photojournalism. “But now, as the public gains awareness of digital photography and Photoshop, they have stopped trusting the pictures in newspapers and magazines.”
It’s part of a larger cultural malaise about “what’s real:”
Themed restaurants, McMansions, virtual life and multiple personas online — we live in a world where authenticity (whatever that means exactly) can feel overwhelmed by slick substitutes and made-up realities. Pictures can be photoshopped, performances can be lip-synched, and the exotic destinations we visit can be about as real as packaged tours and paid local dancers. We have Olive Gardens that are not gardens and whole towns that are themed to please.
So, what is real? What is deeply, indisputably authentic today? And why do we long for more of it, in our world and ourselves?
Trademark law can police the authenticity issue for some products, and may help us out of the “fake photo” question. Secondary authentication techniques are used for many products–e.g., an embedded code that can be matched to a database on the trademark owners’ website. By analogy, a photog who wants us to take his/her picture seriously may embed it with steganographically with assurances of its unaltered nature.
I’m less concerned about the “Olive Garden” or “am I really being true to myself” question. Survival in a modern market economy means being pretty protean. Angst over authenticity is also an epiphemenon of affluence (or perhaps a symptom of affluenza), and as I’ve suggested before, a country as leveraged as the US is not likely to have the luxury of that problem for long. (More on the “revenge of the real” here.) A future for some rising nations might be glimpsed in a film like “The Shopaholics,” where concerns about “self-transformation described in the language of authenticity” are forsaken for a madcap pursuit of luxury products.
UPDATE: Just noticed this indictment of the US as “land of the fake:”
Meyer, NPR’s new editorial director of digital media, can rattle off plenty of examples: corporations that profess to care about you, the words “managed care,” and reality shows that promise a shot at love with a celebrity called Tila Tequila. Those are some of the gripes to be found in Meyer’s new book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium.
August 24, 2008 at 8:16 am
Posted in: Bioethics
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Responses (4)
James Grimmelmann - August 24, 2008 at 9:39 am
This falls into the category of things I think of as true but not worrisome. Anxiety about authenticity is not new.
Bruce Boyden - August 24, 2008 at 12:25 pm
we live in a world where authenticity (whatever that means exactly) can feel overwhelmed by slick substitutes and made-up realities.
I doubt authenticity has much in the way of feelings at all. And I’m not just being a grammar nitpicker here — fixing the sentence makes it much less supportive of the point: “People who value authenticity (whatever that means exactly) are feeling overwhelmed by slick substitutes and made-up realities.” That may be true, but why should we care about those people?
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 24, 2008 at 2:41 pm
This post calls to mind some remarks of Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): “the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debord [in The Society of the Spectacle, 1967] has observed, in an extraordinary phrase, that in it ‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification.’” This is one consequence of the fact that “aesthetic production today has been integrated into commodity production generally.” And the alienation of the subject is complemented or replaced by the omnipotence of fragmentation (thus, in post-Freudian psychoanalytic terms, rather than oedipal-level neurotic pathologies we find pre-oedipal, narcissistic, and borderline character disorders revolving around problems of separation-individuation and coherence of the self).
A.J. Sutter - August 24, 2008 at 11:27 pm
1. “This falls into the category of things I think of as true but not worrisome. Anxiety about authenticity is not new” — Just because the anxiety isn’t new doesn’t mean it’s misplaced. Maybe its persistence should make it more worrisome, not less. Or maybe it’s just too important to be complacent about.
2. I recently had occasion to read some Italian and German books about business leadership, along with an anthology of about 40 US articles on the same subject (many from Harvard Business Review), in connection with a magazine piece I was writing. I was struck how the American writers emphasized “authenticity,” while the European writers emphasized “trust.”
Almost without exception, too, the American writers were focused on how the leader projects his or her personality, while the Europeans were focused on making sure that the leader understands the feelings of those who are being led. (A bit ironic, in light of early- and mid-20th Century history.)
In this context, “authenticity” suggests merely a plausible appearance, rather than genuineness. So I do find it worrisome that it’s “authenticity” that has become so highly prized in American culture.
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