Authenticity vs. Self-reflexivity
From Slacker Manager: Authenticity at work:
Authenticity gets a lot of play these days. Seems like everyone talks about it, especially in terms of blogging. “Good bloggers gotta be authentic–gotta have an authentic voice.” I don’t dispute the truth there, but I think the concept of authenticity is getting diluted.
The way I see authenticity coming into play as a Slacker@Work is pretty simple and it plays well with that last definition. Authenticity says “this is me, who are you?“. Authenticity is neither passive, nor aggressive. It seems like a lot of what gets passed off as authenticity these days is more along the lines of “this is me and if you don’t like it, screw you.“
I realize that I’m tipping my “college boy” hand here, but I’m reminded of Adorno’s critique of authenticity: that the idea of authenticity cannot be communicated without a reference to ideology, thus perpetuating said ideology.
I know that in order to process my inbox, I need some external motivation, and that knowing is authentic. It would be inauthentic for me to say, “well, I just a have schedule of cleaning my inbox and only I know when I need to do it” rather than acknowledging my actual external motivation. Being an authentic manager then, is both knowing yourself and acknowledging your motivations.
I’m going to get super geeky here. This brings to mind not so much “authenticity” as Giddens’ location of self-reflexivity as central to the modern project of personality. Authenticity assumes an objective connection to the essential nature of a thing, and that any distance between appearance and essence is due to ignorance or duplicity. Giddens’ reflexivity is less an analysis of an objective condition–the ontological seperation of experience from truth–but rather a state of introspective mindfulness about internet and external influences.
The difference is that, given the question “Why am I doing this?”, Slacker Manager suggests that we can and should know the answer, while Giddens would say that the answer is not meaningful but the process of asking is illuminating.
As you were.