Authenticity
Authenticity, in an individual sense, probably threatens
every power structure -- from autocratic to democratic
to consensual. How is it dealt with and group
cohesion maintained? Is it dealt with differently in different power structures?
Exile in one, tolerance in another?
I don't think email need be any less authentic than
ftf. It _could_ be less authentic; after all, it's easier to fake a letter
than a phone call, and hardest of all to fake a ftf
meeting. Done well, there's elegance in the
written word. Perhaps it's a matter
of artistic taste
creativity versus didacticism. neither is less "authentic"
than the other.
Yes, "authenticity" needs some unpacking. Our "true
selves" are not a monolithic gold-standard. Conversely, I'm not willing to
concede that we "create ourselves and others in this fictive environment".
It's somewhere in between.
Authenticity as a concept invokes a person enacting
the role; doesn't make sense without one.
It isn't the creativity, nor the didacticism, that's
authentic. It's the person being creative or didactic in a manner that reflects
his/her personhood. Authenticity is an _inference_ we make about others,
and perhaps even ourselves.
we are very finely tuned psychologically with respect
to making social evaluations involving things like assessing veracity, motivation
etc, even in a textually presented problem only. It probably taps into
some fairly prominent frontal lobe equipment developed
at great evolutionary expense presumably because of its survival value.
Character isn't any different on the net, it's that
we have less evidence by which to recognize it.
Compared to other means of communication, veracity and
authenticity are difficult to get a feel for here. Thanks to eons of practice,
though, our sensitive antennae still can pick up the faint signals. I suspect
we use a heuristic of comparing what we read to our mental library of actual
human encounters, and do a goodness-of-fit analysis to decide if this is
likely to be an actual human encounter.
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