I absolutely loved the New York Time’s Sunday Styles’ cultural takedown of the word authentic in the current discourse. It was both insightful and hilarious even if it did shed light on the obvious. The gist of the article is how the use and over-use of the word authentic has made the term hollow and borderline meaningless especially when used by people trying to describe themselves. It’s sort of like the popular saying, if you tell me you’re honest, you must not be. And with the exponential growth of online persona management – particularly with the rise of social media – people are faced more so now than ever before with the challenge of how to portray, convey or just be themselves when the medium is the intermediary. Many people, including a huge number of entrepreneurs, go to great lengths to be strategic in their social media strategies. For many independent business owners, social media is a way to “sell yourself without appearing to be selling yourself.” It made me pause and question, with that conundrum in mind, how does you cultivate your identity as a business owner? Is it even possible to be authentic online? And how can you be deliberate in how you want to be perceived with out risking being inauthentic?
I found the timing of this article to coincide nicely with a recent article that I read in the New Yorker about Tim Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Work Week. Rebecca Mead did an absolutely fabulous job of describing Tim Ferris’s “authentic” self, at least as she experienced him. What it made me wonder was: is that the “authentic” version of Tim Ferris that Tim Ferris would promote?
-Amy
