好莱坞的雄鹰
几位著名的BC校友最近很忙.
摄影:Lee Pellegrini
真品行业
电子游戏软件 Associate Professor Michael Serazio’s new book explores how claims of authenticity have come to dominate our culture.
2024年冬
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In 2016, the pop star Lady Gaga announced a tour of dive bars to promote her new album, 乔安妮. The small and gritty venues were nothing like the arenas and stadiums where a star of her stature usually plays. They were more intimate and more in keeping with what she called the “raw Americana vibe” of the album. 传递的信息很明确:旅游, 比如它支持的音乐, 代表着对真实事物的回归, 一些真实的. Never mind that the entire tour consisted of just three performances, after which Gaga went right back to the red carpets and arenas, or that it was sponsored by the mammoth brand Bud Light. An appearance of authenticity was the entire point of the exercise, Michael Serazio说, an associate professor of communications whose new book, 真品行业: Keeping it “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics, examines the ways in which presentations of “authenticity” have been used by celebrities, 政客们, and marketers who recognize the concept’s power to connect with consumers at a time when people are desperate for something that feels genuine and true.
These claims to authenticity are pervasive enough in our culture that Merriam-Webster named authenticity its 2023 word of the year. But what exactly do we mean when we call 一些真实的? 在报道他的书时, Serazio说, he found that people were using authenticity “in really nebulous ways.” When his sources talked about what made 一些真实的, 这个词可以扩展成多种意思, with uses as disparate as an effort to show that someone wasn’t doing something for the money and a claim that an independent coffee shop is more appealing than a Starbucks. But the term’s elasticity doesn’t hurt its effectiveness among consumers, and a motivated and ambitious advertiser will take note of what’s working, leading to ever more extensive efforts to craft it for us. “这些行业变得越精明,塞拉齐奥说, “the more difficult it is to know what’s being faked for us and what’s real.”
塞拉齐奥专门用了一章来讨论真人秀, a genre that depends on projecting an aura of authenticity—they’re called reality shows for a reason—but that has had an increasingly difficult time capturing it. Contestants on these shows are supposedly presenting their genuine selves to the audience, but Serazio writes that after years of watching such programming, they fully understand the game: Becoming a star involves amping up the drama and playing to the camera, 这就意味着他们是不真实的. This dynamic has forced casting directors to go to greater and greater lengths to find truly “authentic” stars who haven’t already been contaminated by watching reality TV programming. Netflix节目的制片人 奇怪的眼睛 tells Serazio that her desire for a suitable person to appear on the show led her to send a scout “to the same sad mall in Kansas City” every day for two weeks. 电视真人秀的人,塞拉齐奥说, “are constantly chasing this thing that is forever eluding their grasp.”
More fascinating is Serazio’s depiction of the degree to which a craving for authenticity has infected politics. Even the election of 2000 showed rumblings of an interest in authenticity from voters, 因为他们模糊地想和乔治·W·布什喝杯啤酒. Bush in a way that Al Gore couldn’t capture, suggesting Bush was “real” in a way Gore wasn’t. 但2016年的总统大选, Serazio说, amounted to “a battle royale around the issue of authenticity.” Donald Trump’s late-night tweeting and off-the-cuff speaking style read as authentic to voters, and Hillary Clinton’s more polished presentation read as a veneer. This difference in 个人风格 became one of the major animating forces behind voting decisions, 尽管事实上发推特, 或不, 并不能代表更多的东西, 好吧, 个人风格. “None of this has anything to do with policy or substance, 或者他们实际上会做些什么来治理国家,塞拉齐奥说.
读完这本书之后, you start to notice the attempts all around you to package and sell authenticity. “这种渴望是真实的,塞拉齐奥说, 为了感觉真实的东西, and anyone trying to sell a product is going to respond to it. Your awareness of this can lead to a kind of cynicism about the world, but Serazio cautioned against letting that overshadow your actual feelings about something. Just because a singer or politician is trying to connect with you via claims of authenticity, it doesn’t mean you need to reject the actual policies a politician has in mind, 或者某人正在制作的音乐. “Don’t be cynical about the values that authenticity peddles. Be skeptical about the way that they’re being peddled,塞拉齐奥说. 
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