Sermon - CoSMI - 1.0.1 - Authenticity
Isaiah 45:19
I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right.
1 Corinthians 13:6
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
This is the first of a series of sermons and devotionals directed at those who work as influencers in the field of social media.
And of the topics that we discussed in considering different subjects to be addressed in this series, the one that stood out to me most of all was that of authenticity.
I am old and have had many different jobs and even careers in my lifetime. Therefore, I have had a great many job interviews. I have had a great deal of advice as to how to present yourself in a job interview, or when writing a resume. A great deal of this advice regards how to present yourself. What type of person you should emulate in order to get the job. How to tell people that you are other than you are. In other words, you should lie to people. When I was young and foolish, I tried to follow this advice, although I did very badly at it. Over the years, I have come to realize that this advice is nonsense. If you present yourself as an active go-getter, when in fact you are a more thoughtful and quiet person, then when you actually get the job, you will be unhappy in it, and they will be unhappy with your performance. Be honest about who you are, and the people who value who you are will figure that out and will hire you. You will enjoy the job, and they will enjoy your performance.
In terms of job interviews, yes, you are correct. A great many companies just simply do not have the skills or patience to figure out who is actually being authentic when they are presenting themselves in a job interview. So, if you present yourself as different than you are; if you present yourself as a go-getter, and a an active person, when you really aren't; then, yes, you probably will get away with it, and you might even be able to get the job with them. Now you have a job in a company that's too stupid to hire the right people. Do you really want to be there? So be honest. Be yourself. Be real. Be authentic. That way you will get a job with one of the few companies that do actually understand people, and do value what you have that makes you you. That's a much better job to have.
I am so very old that I remember when there was no social media. I remember when the first social media platforms began to appear and began to be called social media, and I remember the great many people who, at that time, in giving advice to those who wanted to get involved in social media, greatly stressed the idea of curating your brand.
There is no way that I can present myself as an influencer. However, I do understand social media. It's very likely that I understand a lot about social media much better than you do. For one thing, I understand information technology. All social media platforms are simply databases. They have different record structures, and different ways of accessing the records, but that's all social media platforms are, is a bunch of databases.
But I have experience with social media as well. I am old, and my favorite social media platform is: email. Yes, way back when email was all that there was, people were social on the Internet. People always find ways to be social and sociable. So they found ways to use this very simple technology in that way.
But, also, when the social media platforms came along, I started to use them. No, I never had a MySpace account: I don't do graphics. But I got an account with Facebook as soon as Facebook opened accounts to the general public. I got an account with Twitter when it started up. I have accounts with more than a dozen different social media platforms. I have had various projects doing podcast-like things. I have taught an entire, forty hour (although eventually the material that I put in there probably added up to something more like sixty hours) course on information security, and how to become a professional in it. I posted that on five different social media platforms. (All in less than ten minute segments, because of the limitations of TikTok.) I have a blog. Yes, I know, blogs are not fashionable. (And my blog isn't so much a blog as it is an extended, and oddly public, grief journal.) I have accounts on platforms that deal primarily with pictures and graphics, and I post sunsets and shots of the moon, and the occasional weird meme that I am able to get generative artificial intelligence to somewhat successfully generate for me. (That's really hard.) So I do know what I'm talking about in terms of social media.
Back to the idea of curating your brand. Curating comes to us from the field of those who manage museums and refers to the practice of taking from among those objects that you actually have in your collection, those items that you wish to display to the general public. "Brand" is a reference to how you wish to be seen. It is the idea that we, while we are many things, would like to only present the best of ourselves in terms of what we post and demonstrate on social media. We should say only what makes us sound interesting, and we should present only that which reflects well upon us.
Now, so far, there is nothing really wrong with that idea. We want to present ourselves in the best possible light. We are presenting ourselves to the public, after all. That is what social media is for: to present ourselves to the general public, as widely as possible. The idea that we want to present the best of ourselves is a valid one.
But people who are working in the field of social media, particularly influencers, have discovered a new word: authentic. Sometimes this word is forced upon them, when they are charged with not being authentic. Fans and consumers of social media have started to realize that, occasionally, their influencers and idols are sometimes inconsistent and unreliable in who they are and in how they present themselves. If an influencer, poster, or presenter presents differently one day than they do the next, then how do you know what they really believe? How do you know that what they are presenting to you is the truth? How do you know that they are authentic?
And so it has come to be that the most important characteristic of a presenter, poster, or influencer is authenticity. (As the old joke about sincerity has it, once you can fake that, you've got it made.)
What is authenticity? At its heart, it is truthfulness. But there are many things that you can say about yourself that are true. When you are being authentic, you are presenting in a way that gives an indication of which of the possible beliefs and influences that are a part of you are the most important. If you are a Christian, and if you present yourself as a Christian when you are posting on social media, you may present yourself as being very solidly and consistently Christian. God is the most important thing in your life. But is that really true? Are you really posting because God is directing you to, or are you posting in order to make money, and you know that there is a sizable proportion of the online population who believe in God and therefore will respond favorably if you say that you do too? Are you a SMevangelist who really doesn't really care whether anyone else comes to a knowledge of God, as long as *you* continue to get likes and followers in high numbers?
When I say this, I do not mean that you have to confess all of your sins and shortcomings to the world at large. I have, elsewhere, tried to explore how far we need to go in discussing topics that are unpleasant and possibly even distasteful. As one who is bereaved, I know that there are topics which our society refuses to discuss, and which we probably should. Rather ironically, in view of my career as a security and privacy expert, I constantly advocate for more openness, honesty, and vulnerability in discussing some of these issues. But I do not demand that everyone air all of their dirty laundry in public. That is not my point to be made here.
But to be an influencer, is to ask a large number of people to give you their trust. In order to be worthy of that trust, you have to be willing to say, quite honestly, who you actually are. There is a reciprocal transparency at play here. Not just who you are when you are presenting about your favorite quick snack, or how to fix a leaky pipe, or giving advice on how to put fashionable outfits together. You have to be honest about your beliefs, your perspective, how you see the world. How you believe the universe actually works, whether or not there is an intelligence, who is a person who wants to be our best friend, will influence whether you think fashion is important at all. Those you are asking to trust you in terms of fashion advice deserve to know something about what you actually, and truly, believe. Are you just in it for the money, or are you saying things that you actually feel to be important?
You have to have authenticity.
And as a Christian, you have an additional reason to be authentic and honest. You are representing the God of Truth. Whether or not you actually present yourself as a Christian, you are speaking to the world, and, in so speaking, you are either lying or telling the truth. As a Christian, you should be telling the truth. God speaks the truth. As His follower, you should too. You need to be honest, consistent, and reliable in what you say, regardless of what the topic is. As I say, regardless of whether you publicly identify yourself on your social media account as a Christian, if you are a Christian, you should be telling the truth.
In terms of being an influencer, it is instructive to look at the celebrities of the past. Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, was a celebrity. She was a movie star. She was a sex symbol. She had numerous marriages and love affairs. But she probably never actually found the love that she always seemed to be looking for. Her husbands and lovers, and subsequent biographers, all seem to agree that it was hard to tell who she really was. Possibly she herself did not know. She seemed to be chasing an idea for herself that would make her famous, and rich, and, well, an influencer, in today's parlance. She certainly got that to a certain extent. She was not a good actor, and seemed to operate on the basis of creating chaos within a movie shoot, and requiring endless numbers of retakes, until all of her acting colleagues were tired and not at their best, and then she would produce an acceptable take. In comparison, therefore, looked very good on the screen. But there didn't never seem to be anything particularly real about her. She certainly had no authenticity. She would be whoever she seemed to think the audience wanted her to be at the moment. And, of course, it's hard to tell at the end of her not terribly long life, whether or not she actually committed suicide, or simply took too many drugs in a constantly drug-fueled existence. This is what inauthenticity does to you.
Be yourself. As they say, everybody else is already taken. As they also say, when you tell the truth, then you don't have to remember so much.
Your job, as an influencer, is hard enough already. You have to constantly come up with opinions and ideas on products that, to be completely and brutally honest, may not always have any interest for you at all. Working up enthusiasm for that, and working up enthusiasm and finding reasons to be enthusiastic about an item that may not initially thrill you, are hard enough, and take enough of your energy. Don't waste your remaining energy by creating a false persona. You are you. You know you the best. Trying to be something or somebody else is just going to make your job all that much harder. And it's also going to mean that you're not going to be authentic. You're not going to be you. And, really, isn't that what people want to see? Isn't that what people want to know about? They want to know about a real person. They aren't necessarily interested in some manufactured persona, which everybody agrees most influencers look like. People come to your postings on social media because they think, rightly or wrongly, they are getting to know you. So let them get to know you correctly. That way, you don't create some huge disappointment down the line when you reveal yourself to be something other than what you have been presenting online.
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. - 2 Timothy 2:15
No comments:
Post a Comment