Online authenticity

This morning, Rob sent me his latest Coffee Vlog, which I’ll embed down below if you want to watch it.

I’m not gonna comment on the video itself since that’s not the point of this post. What I am going to talk about, is the feeling I had while watching it. Contrary to his Yo! videos, in this one, he felt genuinely authentic to me. Let me explain what I mean by that.

These days, everyone online is, or tries to be, a product. People generally try to sell themselves to an audience in an attempt to earn something back. That “something” is, more often than not, money. This is (mostly) true for youtubers, bloggers, twitchers (is that even a word?) and instagrammers. The audience doesn’t like you because of the whole package, it likes you because of the persona you showcase while you’re online. Which is ok, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What’s lost in this social dynamic though, is the concept of authenticity. And that’s because authenticity is sadly not entertaining. People don’t want to see the 24 drafts of your latest blog posts or the 15 attempts to record that video intro. They want to see you being out in the world snapping awesome pictures of architecture or cats or cars and not at the grocery store buying toilet paper. Because who cares about that right?

That’s probably one of the saddest byproducts of this social media age: the death of true authenticity.