Tag Archives: personal authenticity

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Seeing Is . . . Well, Just Seeing

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Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars and dogs playing poker.

Pardon me for saying the obvious. But it is no longer possible to trust photos we routinely see on many internet platforms. Perhaps I am the last to notice, but a combination of photo-shopping and animation has begun to make it a challenge to tell the difference between the real and the fake. Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars, dogs playing poker, and a preschooler performing Shostakovich. A.I.-produced photos and videos have gotten that good. A few days ago I saw an image of the President playing golf, but looking mighty wide from the back. The photo suggested that seat belt extenders would definitely be a required item on Air Force One. That picture was probably photoshopped, much like what his own team does when he shows up in a meme that would be an eight-year-old’s idea of an action figure.

Fast Food Worker From the Feline Community
byu/ZashManson inaivideo

As in the above example, some images are too cute. But it must be getting harder for photo editors in various news organizations to verify less playful images that come their way. That’s one advantage to keep photojournalists on staff. By contrast, social media represents the equivalent of the wild west. Too many people are willing to ignore the courtesy of sincere veracity that would have been honored even a generation ago.

If we already live in a world where fantasies are mistaken as fact, what are we to do with the age-old axiom that “seeing is believing?” We all recognize the obvious giveaways in classic animation and set-ups like the above example of a feline fast food worker. It is quite another thing to conceal artificial creations about subjects that matter in photorealistic material. Apparently, our non-literate President has already been deceived by “news” videos of indeterminate origin passed on by others; Trump gorges on his preferred medium of images.

There are folks on YouTube who have tried to show how a fake can be recognized. I appreciate their efforts. But short of seeing a third arm on a person, I often miss the ostensible giveaway in a fabricated piece. And there appears to be no uniform or emerging norms for labeling a counterfeit picture or a video.

Of course the larger context here is that hand-wringing over hybrid kinds of media is not new. Critics and theorists have debated for some years about the authenticity of all sorts of arts that are easily reproduced. A classic is Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And there is the conductor and composer John Phillip Sousa, who claimed that the “canned music” of a recording debased the real thing. Add in the complexity that an estimated half of all social media content now is created by various forms of A.I. and we have a problem.

Many who have made a systematic study of the internet generally note that there has been a steady decline in authentic human-generated content. Again, this applies most directly to platforms like X, Facebook, and the like. A more recent transformation is video, where producers can add facsimiles of live action in convincing photographic detail.

Film and video have always been used to spin out fantasies that speak to our fears and desires. But it is a newer twist to mask the fake in reproductions that are plausibly real. Will newer generations have the skills to detect plausible but fanaticized reproductions? Can a culture function when source authenticity is always in doubt? More than ever need the solid anchor of conversing with people in real time and space.

The Paradox of Our Multiple Selves

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        Auguste Renoir: The Conversation

 A person who is “the same with everyone” is perhaps not as well adapted to their social environment as we might think.

Anyone studying human communication will soon realize that there is a built in paradox that pits our assumptions about personal authenticity against convincing evidence that effective communication requires many selves.  There are those famous words from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. . .” 

And there’s this reliable contradiction: while we long for connection to individuals who will not say the wrong things in the wrong places, we also want reliable friends we can count on to be their predictable selves. If these two ideas aren’t at odds with each other, they are surely going in different directions, explaining why even those we know best can still disappoint.

Variations of what’s called “role theory” in sociology and “dramatistic ratios” in communication emphasize the consummate role-player.  Each posits that, over time, we become  performers able to manage how we present ourselves to others.  We have many faces: whatever a setting requires.

Imagine some of the roles that may exist for a young woman with her own family: mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend to a prickly neighbor, friend to others who don’t like the prickly neighbor, employee, church committee chairperson, weekend campaigner for a social action movement, and so on.  Any of us who interact with “Meg” will know her by mostly what she says and does.  But we are also not likely to see her in all of her other roles, something of a blessing for her.  If she is reasonably well adjusted, she plays her parts well.  In essence she is a one-person repertory company, since each setting puts her in front of a different audience.  Meg may tell racy jokes over drinks with some friends. But she’s a different kind of person with her children, her parents and certainly those folks at  the church where she helps out.  A person who is “the same with everyone” is not as able to deal with their social environments as well as we might think.

The challenge for us is that, while we express enthusiasm for the idea of “personal authenticity,” the odds are great that we would be uncomfortable with individuals who struggle to meet the different normative expectations of different “audiences.”  Violations of these expectations in the forms of unusual behavior and ill-chosen words would probably be enough to make us want to put some distance between ourselves and Meg.

Think of all the one-off individualists we celebrate in the movies (characters created over the years by Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, James Cagney, Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew Mcconaughey, Dustin Hoffman, Lena Dunham or Vince Vaughn.)  Character actors often give us individuals who seem to have been cut from a different cloth.  But even though they attract us to screen narratives, their characters might well repel us as friends.  In the flesh, we love our adaptable companions.  Role-taking oils the social machinery that we would prefer to run smoothly.

People diagnosed on the autism spectrum are sometimes less able to read social cues. Many discover that by memorizing common social “scripts” they can still manage in what would otherwise be bewildering settings.  To be sure, many have compensating strengths, like better resistance to the kinds of distractions that plague many of us.  Even so, like those for whom the social impulse comes more easily, they can appreciate the value of  the daily shape-shifting that is part of making one’s way in the world.