ABSTRACT
In their 2007 book entitled Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine argue that contemporary industrial and information societies are being commodified and virtualized, with everyday life becoming saturated with “toxic levels of inauthenticity [that] we’re forced to breathe” (43). The authors cite a variety of issues to support their claim, including the ideas that most of the emails we get are not from people we know or feel we should trust; less news comes from the first-hand accounts of journalists in the field, but is rather recycled in the blogosphere; previously unnecessary terms such as “real person” have emerged in the field of customer service to describe who we are trying to reach; friends are not “really” friends unless we confirm them on our MySpace or Facebook accounts. Their list goes on with an underlying theme rooted in technology and consumption: namely, contemporary shifts in mediated reality and experience are pushing consumer populations to yearn for authenticity.
