Book Review: The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics

In The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics, journalist-turned-media studies professor Michael Serazio helps us understand how authenticity gets constructed, by whom, and to what ends. Serazio argues that authenticity is “nothing short of the central moral framework of our time”: on a quest to alleviate the anxieties and pressures of modern life, we pursue an inner sense of self—one purportedly unaffected by contemporary economic and social forces (p. 2). However, a careful choreography goes into authentic performance, professionalized by what Serazio dubs the “authenticity industries”: a subset of cultural industries including reality television, music, and politics. Through an analysis of more than seventy interviews and extensive press coverage, Michael Serazio argues that authenticity has become more important, and more profitable, than ever before amidst a reality of alienating technological standardization and capitalistic marketplace motives.