Heather Armstrong
The Fraud of Authenticity
The most significant and far-reaching change in the landscape of content creation on the Internet in the last few years is the slaughter of individual voices in favor of a mad dash toward celebrity. The audiences who used to consume diverse and wonderfully disordered narratives online are being conditioned to value an increasingly homogenized sea of “influencers” whose voices are indecipherable from one another. What forces are driving this change? And what does this mean for our children who will grow up in a world where the line between “individual” and “brand” has never been blurred?