• affordances
• audience
• authenticities
• authenticity
• authenticity dimensions
• authenticity markers
• authenticity[ies]
• BeReal
• communicative affordances
• communicative values
• descriptive
• descriptive authenticity
• engagement
• feedback
• framework
• Gibson
• idioms of practice
• Instagram
• model
• networked self
• networked values
• norms of use
• philosophical
• philosophy
• practice
• practice markers
• practices
• prescriptive
• prescriptive authenticity
• social media
• social media studies

Upon closer examination of the main treatments of authenticity, a significant disparity becomes apparent: the current, widely accepted uses of ‘authenticity’ do not seem to align with the philosophical understanding of the concept. This discrepancy is particularly pronounced when comparing social media users’ discussions with the philosophical treatments of the term. The understanding of the concept in contemporary society seems to lack the moral and telic meaning attributed to it in philosophical contexts, which raises a crucial question: What do individuals mean when claiming to be authentic through the use of a specific social media platform? The present work aims to answer this question by advancing a characterization of authenticity[ies] as practices in social media.

In the first chapter, authenticity’s philosophical genesis and development are analyzed. Attention is given to the main criteria of authenticity discussed by philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Taylor. Such an exposition does not aim to be exhaustive but to provide a general picture of the maneuvers and commonalities of the philosophical treatments of the term. Then, the critiques of authenticity are presented, and the arguments for treating authenticity as a practice are advanced. The main claims are that the term has a polysemic nature that allows for such an understanding and that it becomes necessary when characterizing some communities’ practices, such as in the case of social media, that would be otherwise inscrutable.

Since the research focuses on digital media, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted, and the contemporary treatment of authenticity within the field of social media studies is presented. Such a presentation grounds the possibility for advancing a characterization of authenticity as a practice since identity construction is primarily taken as a relational process of self-performances and feedback within digital communities that use platforms as environments for interaction. To maintain a concrete connection with everyday users’ experiences, a bottom-up method was adopted, and the theoretical research was anchored to the case study of Instagram and BeReal, two platforms that promote different and incompatible versions of authenticity.

The second chapter examines the role of platforms’ functionalities in the practices of authenticity. The adoption of affordances is justified, and an analysis of Gibson’s introduction of the term, its development in design theory, and its use in social media studies is presented. From such a literature review, a framework for analyzing authenticities in social media, particularly on Instagram and BeReal, is advanced. Following context-based and platform-sensitive criteria, persistence, asynchronicity, editability, visibility, association, and social presence were taken as the affordances that better related both to authenticity and the platforms’ functionalities. The literature review by Salisbury and Pooley (2017), as well as the research by Kreling et al. (2022) and McRae (2017), were taken at face value to define their relationship with authenticity. These studies identified what the firsts called authenticity markers —criteria used by social media users to assess what is authentic: consistency, spontaneity, disclosure, expectation of response, originality, and amateurism. The relation between affordances and authenticity markers was then thoroughly examined, and, to avoid any technological determinism, was characterized as that of ‘enabling negotiation,’ meaning that platforms’ affordances enable the negotiation of authenticity markers, which nonetheless happens at the level of the community through the games on self-performances and feedback between individuals. Such a framework was then applied to the case study in order to analyze the authenticity practices of Instagram and BeReal. In the last section, the hypothesis of the coexistence of an indefinite number of versions of authenticity in social media was confirmed, and the necessity for the introduction of the plural 'authenticities' was argued.

The third chapter examines the interplay between the elements introduced in the first and second chapters by advancing a model for characterizing authenticity[ies] as practices in the contexts of social media that aims both at providing a general understanding of the phenomenon and opening the possibility for analyzing authenticities other than those studied in the present work. Then, the philosophical implications of such an understanding of authenticity, as the possibility for a descriptive notion of the term, the reconfiguration of the moral, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions of authenticity, the problems that derive from the coexistence of an indefinite number of authenticity versions, and the consequences for the individual, are examined. Finally, the problems that felt out of the scope of the present work and could be the object of further research were presented.