Television is fake. It’s always been fake and will always be fake. Shows are portrayed realistically, but ooze fakeness. Everything is cleanly performed, shot, produced, edited; And it’s too clean, too witty, too clever, too convenient; all in the ways that people are not. Real people say things awkwardly, make jokes that don’t land, and often can’t find anything to say at all. That is the rift between reality and television. Now, none of this is new. Everyone knows that TV is fake, and is perfectly fine with this. Fake is over there in that flat screen and reality is over here with these people I’m physically adjacent to. That is until social media burst onto the scene and created authenticity in mass media.
Social media gave mass media the reality check it desperately needed. Social media eliminates clinically executed quips and predictable scripted conversations, unfiltered and unpracticed humanity became available online for all to see. People from my generation grew up along side the varying social networks and that influenced our expectations from media. TV became old fashioned because we no longer passively accept its fakeness. To many of us, it’s just not interesting if it’s fake, and entertainment has has to be genuine and real to be valuable. With TV no longer satisfying our entertainment needs, we turn to the internet’s TV, YouTube. The success of Youtube is it’s humanity. YouTube doesn’t have popular characters, it has popular people, who are just being people. Talking about their day, what they like, whatever news interested them in that day, just like social media. There are no scripts, nobody trying to convince you that the video is more than it is, just Wheezy Waiter recounting the events of touring with his band.
There is an argument to be made that the authenticity in all forms of internet media is only perceived authenticity. In the internet media business, nobody is referred to strictly as a person; they are called personalities. There is a scale between being entirely yourself and entirely playing a character. Youtubers and their “personalities” are in the middle of this scale. They are exaggerating certain aspects of their personalities to make their videos entertaining, but that does not mean they are being disingenuous. I argue that they are still being authentic enough to not feel misleading, like television shows.
The uncanny valley is “the phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.” People see something that’s not quite a reflection of humanity, inherently recognize that it’s not real, and are then repulsed by it. Media has experienced problems with realism and authenticity since it’s inception and, despite its off-puttingly overproduced nature, has been largely given a pass. The internet and social media generation are rebelling against this now, because we grew up with a more truthful version of human interactions and experiences on websites like Facebook or YouTube. The internet is helping reduce mass media’s uncanny valley.
Article By Taylor Kalsey
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