Fake plastic trees: Authenticity in contemporary popular media culture

Discourses of authenticity are omnipresent in contemporary consumer society. Many of those discourses maintain that authenticity is a quality inherent to certain cultural artifacts and practices and that the ability to differentiate the authentic from the inauthentic is commonsensical. Rather than viewing authenticity as an inherent property, I look for those instances in which discourses of authenticity---inscribed onto cultural artifacts and practices---work to differentiate cultural artifacts and practices and subsequently structure cultural distinctions. In this project, I look to isolate those moments when cultural distinctions rely upon assumptions regarding authenticity. Authenticity---an ostensibly inherent property of artifacts and practices---is a constructed, contrived, and constituted phenomenon. Yet, it permeates contemporary culture and structures distinctions and hierarchies that manifest in contemporary society.;I take as my objects of inquiry seemingly banal instances from the terrain of popular culture and popular media and interrogate the ways in which authenticity manifests within that terrain. Rather than existing antithetically to contemporary technology and consumer society, authenticity often emerges within these discourses as a way of reinforcing and constituting cultural distinctions. The logic of authenticity helps make sense of media phenomena like the lonelygirl15 controversy, confers cultural capital upon certain cultural artifacts and practices like indie rock, helps structure decisions about consumption like whether to patronize the Olive Garden, and differentiates between performances on the stage of contemporary consumer culture. Though it is a constructed phenomenon, it creates the conditions of possibility for an affective investment with the potential to effect and structure tastes, distinctions, and consumer decisions---running the gamut from which candidate to endorse to which restaurant to patronize.;Ultimately, I contend that the affective investment contains the conditions of possibility for authenticity to articulate with that ostensibly exist outside of the realm of the authentic/inauthentic binary. The constructed desire to consume and perform authentically articulates those discourses of authenticity to issues of cultural hierarchy and elitism. The cultural distinctions that authenticity works to structure works to reinforce and constitute the emergence of a new cultural elite, one more concerned with practices of consumption than with the specific accumulation of wealth.