Authenticity

Citation

(2004), "Authenticity", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 53 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2004.07953aae.001

Authenticity

David BoyleFlamingoISBN: 0007140169£12.99

"Real" and "genuine" are increasingly used to sell us things – real leather, genuine walnut, even "Coke – The Real Thing". Yet, at the same time, there are concerns that we are increasingly at the mercy of spin doctors who shield us from the truth and invent "alternative realities" for us.

This book is subtitled Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, and attempts to start the process of helping us distinguish one set of realities from another. It starts with a visit to the artificial Ocean Dome in Myazaki, Japan – a giant bubble containing 13,500 tons of water, with enough (synthetic) beach to accommodate 10,000 people. Boyle points out that many people feel that this artifice is sufficiently real to constitute "the ocean", yet it is within yards of the Pacific coast, where the "real" ocean exists. Boyle suggests that this mix of, and confusion between, the "real" and the "pseudo-real" needs to be understood as it affects the way our lives are shaped by politicians, businessmen and others.

Our admiration for the virtual and the artificial is clear – yet for some time we have been insisting on an artificiality that mimics the real. Boyle suggests that this is now changing. Perhaps the dotcom boom (and bust) was the tilting point – when the bubble burst and people started to crave real reality once more. So, we have seen the emergence of phenomena such as farmers' markets, travel rather than holidaying, and so on.

Boyle suggests that our re-awakening needs a degree of sophistication before we are able to cope with the world of fake realities. We need to find a new set of relationships between democracy, individualism and capitalism. The absence of world war and the prosperity of the past 50 years in western societies has created a demand for personalised lifestyles on a mass scale. Products and experiences that once would have been regarded as limited to specific times, places and cultures are now open to mass participation. In the UK, home ownership is regarded as "the norm", for example.

However, this searching for personal choice undermines the collective institutions that we used to guide our sense of what is real and what really matters. Now, we have to create fake realities simply to satisfy the consumer demand. Democratising taste has led to great pressure that in turn makes it difficult to define "reality" in an objective way. We end up as detached cynics, striving for small niches of remaining reality.

And on to the real point. Boyle suggests that the above situation leads to us being exploited by external forces that may not be quite what they seem. There is an overarching sense of loss of control. This results in the great Internet conspiracy theories. However, Boyle tests the myths and assumptions of modernity: the idea that artificial standardisation can improve on irregular nature, the belief that technology can give us mastery over ourselves, and that the individual is sovereign in isolation from his or her social context.

Boyle is motivated by an obvious philosophy: he emphasises learning, human-scale relationships and a richer quality of life. This book is not a manual on how to reach his ideal world, more a questioning of the one we are in – leaving us to decide which kind of reality the future should hold.